NMD 442 Sophia C-C

Discussed article can be viewed here   This article is an op-ed piece that we were also assigned to read in NMD 102 last year.  The first time I read it last year it was extremely challenging.  This time through it is still a challenging read due to the writing style, but I have discovered that part of my struggle last year was that I was not familiar with any of the language used in the UX field.   The ideas presented in the article are supporting the importance of an empathy driven design process, something also stressed by one of the guest speakers for NMD 442, Stephen Crowley.  Both claim that good design is not possible if a) the designer's bias is not removed as much as possible, and b) the design is not focused on solving a specific user problem.   I think it is easier to focus less on maximizing empathy and focus more on removing one's bias and focusing the product towards a specific problem.  A large part of this is ...

The discussed article can be found here This article was a writeup of a study done at Tufts university.  I will admit that I skimmed much of it due to poor time management and necessary prioritization, but I did closely read the results.  The results were focused on effective storyboarding techniques, and while the results were similar to what had been established in class, it was good to see written confirmation that our gut instinct was more or less correct.   An effective storyboard briefly explains the problem and the proposed solution. It does not have extraneous detail, has enough frames to explain the idea but not enough to confuse, and will often have small bits of text to add more context and to clarify the situation.   Discussion Questions: Would a video be an effective storyboard?  Or would that be a different thing altogether? Is a storyboard a user experience in itself?  As such, would making a successful one re...

The final project for this class is a packet outlining a user experience, including personas, storyboards, and experience narratives.  It is supposed to be something we are intimately familiar with and something we care deeply about. I am intimately involved with art and theater, I am actually writing this as I wait for an audition. I would like to create an idea for something to assist people as they prepare for auditions and learn their lines.  Auditioning for productions and then preparing to actually perform is stressful and challenging.  There is a lot of pressure to memorize blocks of text, choreography, even emotions as quickly as possible.  Having either a mobile or desktop app that could assist with line memorization would help alleviate some of that stress.  The main feature of the app would be a simulation of another person reading along with your lines, like a prompter.  It would use a combination of uploaded text, text to speech, and spee...

Per Mike Scott's instruction, this blog will be undergoing a redesign.  There will be different pages for different topics (i.e. a page for drawings and prototypes and a different page for responses) to help make the content more accessible.   

the service can be accessed here For the app development project (my part of that project is detailed here , while my partner's is detailed here ), we made a prototype using a service called, a platform designed to facilitate product design and prototyping.  Once the prototype as been made, there are different ways that it can be shared.  There is a shareable link  that can be used on a desktop or mobile device, there is the InVision app that can support the prototype as if it was an actual app, and hypothetically, a way to embed the prototype into a Twitter or blog post. This is an attempt to embed the prototype into a blog post.  It does not work, nor does it successfully embed into a Twitter post.

The complete prototype can be viewed here My classmate and I were paired up to work on designing an app that would work as a way to connect people with snow-filled driveways and plow guys.  I have been working on generating the prototype to show to potential developers and/or user.  I did this using photoshop to make the screens, and then putting them into a prototype generator called inVision. When we were discussing how we wanted the app to function, we heavily referenced the About.me onboarding system, but integrated some of the critiques we had of it, namely the ability to see how long the process will be and navigation between tabs of the process.  The design we came up with uses a series of dots on the bottom of the screen, as shown. The current screen's dot is highlighted in yellow, showing the user where they are in the onboarding process.  If the user wants to go back to a previous page, they simply tap on the associated dot and it brings them ba...