SM3511

The article explained what is contextual design and details of all steps in contextual design. The article claims that by applying contextual design in the work, the working team can communicate better and product a product or technology which match the customers' need more. Contextual design with start with interviewing customers to know their working habits; then use a work model to structure up their habit thus the team can understand it; and then the team should gather more amount of data and map it out to see the characteristic of large population of customers; by knowing the characteristic of customers, design team can find technology which can improve the customers' work and redesign their workflow; at last the team should also test with the real user to optimizes the system. In my opinion, as I do not have the experience that work in a large design team, I have never tried or encountered with contextual design. But I think it is a brilliant way to do interface desig...

This paper tried to found out features of groups of people doing heuristic evaluation on interfaces design. And it gives out the result that there are not really a "absolute good evaluator"  or a  "absolute poor evaluator". As different person will have different perspective to look at things. The same design may become a usability problem to some groups of people while the other groups of people may not consider it as a usability problem. So, heuristic evaluation should be done with people from different characters and background. This paper has a bit inspired me, as I always think that people that spots more problem means that their are more smart. And the company should hire these kinds of people to do the heuristic evaluation. But this paper told me that I have overlooked who are the real users. Every individuals perceive the world in different way. If the user are the mass, we will never know what problems that they may encounter. So, we should evaluate every...

In the starting of chapter 3 of the book, Normans claims that people's behavior will be constrained by the information in the world, old memories in their brain and the cultural habits.  Thus, people may found confused to use new apparatus or product especially which are made from the other countries. And I think he is right. I deal with varies software and operation system during my student life in SCM. And all the hotkeys of them are different, which makes my feel confused and frustrated to use. For example, I have been used Win OS for more than 10 years. My brain tells my that when you scroll the wheel of the mouse up, the browser page will goes up. But in Mac OS, it is in reverse. When you scroll the mouse wheel up, the page go down. And it has bothered me a lot when I were using Mac OS. Another example is the Adobe Photoshop. Before I used the Photoshop, I knew that Ctrl+z will be the hot key to undo the action in any software. But in Photoshop, you need to press Ctrl+Alt+Z...