Chunk10

"Smart technologies have the capacity to enhance pleasure, simplify lives, and add to our safety. I wrote about people who had trouble turning on and off the correct burners on their stoves." (Norman, 2007)

Do you have the experience of being uncertainty of which burner to turn on? Do you have the experience of forgetting turning off the burner and going out of home? Do you unsatisfy the outlook of your stove? Watch the video below, this kind of stove will solve those problems.

"In the future, foods will have computer-readable tages so that the refrigerator will know what is inside it and what you are putting in or taking out." (Norman, 2007)

This great idea can not only be applied to refrigerator, but also to wardrobe, drawer and closet, etc. You may forget where the expected item is in your wardrobe, no matter whether the wardrobe is well organized or in a mess. It usually takes more time to find the item out. Can designers add a monitor to the wardrobe, through which you can see all your items from each angle clearly and find the item you needs quickly.

Chunk9

"Proper feedback can make the difference between a measurable, successful system and one that frustrates and confuses." (Norman, 2007)

Norman talked about inappropriate use of feedback is frustrating with simple devices such as elevators and mentioned his colleague's frustrating experience with elevators. His colleague missed  elevators several times due to no sound to signal their arrival or departure.

The calgary transit has been the top frustrating thing to me since I came here. The bus won't stop until someone drags the ring. As a newcomer, I'm unfamiliar with all the surroundings. Although I know the stop ID of my destination, I really have difficulty knowing when to drag the ring and when to get off without any kind of notice, especially when it is my first time to a new place. I believe I'm not the only one complaining about it. The bus transit has completely no communication with passengers. Appropriate feedback, like notifying us the name of next stop, will make a great difference in our convenient life.

"Quiet is good; silence may not be." (Norman, 2007)

Norman referred to that we need natural sounds created by internal operations of devices to reassure they are working properly. But I prefer to choose silent home appliances. The reasons are as follows:

1. Some noise poduced by home appliances is really disturbing. I enjoy quiet environment.

2. People can detect whether appliances are operating well or not without sounds.

For example, I don't want to hear the disturbing whir of the fan for home heating system. Without the whir of fan, I can also know if there's something wrong with the heating system through the temperature.

Chunk8

"The house has seventy-five sensors that measure each room's temperature, ambient light, sound levels, door and window positions, the weather outside and amount of sunlight, and any movements by inhabitants." (Norman, 2007)

Would you like to live in this kind of house? Everything seems to be under control of smart machines, and to be easy and convenient for human beings, while some people may feel uncomfortable. What's your preference?

"There may be much sharing of kowledge and activities, but it is still difficult to know exactly what another person intends to do." (Norman, 2007)

The success of intelligient machines largely depend on their communication level with people. But the problem lies in how can machines correctly know people's thoughts, as even people themselves are wondering what to do next sometimes.

"The designers are looking for large phenomena, major points of frustration or annoyance, where simple solutions can have a major, positive effect." (Norman, 2007)

This is probably the answer to why homes can make people smart. Only intelligient person can identify problems in daily life and find solutions to them. Most of us are quite "lazy" and adaptive to existing living patterns so that we do not brainstorm how to improve our life and regard it as a scientist' task. Remember that everyone can be a scientist, which depends on how hard you are planning to work.  

Chunk7

"Uses are not designers, and being able to envision something that doesn't exist is a rare skill. Conversely, designers are not users, so it doesn't matter whether they personally think something is easy." (Nielsen, 2010)

When conducting evaluation, designers should assign specific tasks to uses, not abstract ones, for users usually do not know what to do when facing a new technology. When designing new products, designers should consider from users' perspectives, like what problems may occur or what are the most difficulty part when using it.

"Only one spot generates valid data — the present." (Nielsen, 2010)

Observing what are people doing right now is an important research method, because it provides researchers the most accurate data of usability. Researchers can closely observe participants' behaviors and immeadiatly identify problems. Focusing on the present is better than looking into the past or future. Human memory can be fallible and future things are unpredictable so that present data is the most effective one.

Chunk6

"Because sound can be both informative and annoying, this raises the difficult design problem of understanding how to enhance its value while minimizing its annoyance." (Norman, 2007)

Sometimes, natural sounds are more annoying than pleasant music. I believe most people prefer to choose pleasant melody rather than kettle whistle as the signal of boiling water.

PS: I would like to answer Chris's question here: what are your thoughts about adding natural sounds to the Multimedia Bell. I would probrably not use natural sounds in our project, because I have a puzzle that what can be called natural sounds in real classrooms. The natural sound of boiling water comes from heated water moving about. What sorts of natural sounds normally take place in classrooms? Sounds created by moving desks and chairs? 

"Although quiet can be good, it can also be dangerous." (Norman, 2007)

Sounds inform us what happen in the surroundings. If there are no sounds, we may not notice the upcoming danger. If all the vehivles are designed to keep silent, there must be increases in traffic accident rates. The task for designers is to make it clear that when to use sound or not.

Chunk5

The article "7 Principles of Effective Icon Design" written by Sean Hodge gives me lots of thooughts in regard to creating icons that work well together and fit seamlessly within our design.

"If you need to draw several icons, you need to think over images for the whole sets of icons before proceeding with illustrating activities."

When designing a set of icons, designers should consider approaching icon design holistically. Designers should have a rough blueprint of the theme, outlook and style of the set of icons at the beginning of design, ensuring icons can be aesthetically appreciated and work together harmoniously. Usually, designers overly focus on one signle icon, ignoring that the whole set of icons should be consistent in style. Although each icon needs to differ from surrounding ones, the set of icons tend to work as a group so that they must be sonsistent.

"There are times when the aesthetic interest of the icon may be worth loosing some of its iconic impact."

I am wondering where this situation may occur. Decorative icons can be used on children's websites or children's educational software. Children usually have a short span of attention, colorful, lovely icons can let them stay for a longer time. I think children do not need to quickly recognize what the icon is. Sometimes they click on certain icons without knowing what it is and what the destination is, only for the reason that they love those attractive icons. Those icons match children's characteristics and arouse their interest. Under this circumstances, loss of quick recognition of symbols is worth the added decoration.

Chunk4

"Whether or not the world should have diversity, it does."

The world does need diversity. Diversity satisfies individuals' variable tastes. For example, when designing presentations, someone prefer to use PowerPoint while others enjoy prezi. Distinguished features of the two presentation tools match diverse demands of different groups of people. Someone is attraced by the "zoom in and zoom out" function of prezi whereas others love those beautiful templates provided by PowerPoint. Then, diversity promotes development of designs. There are so many related products in one domain. For example, elluminate and wimba are two leading web conferencing systems used in educational context. What is the weapon the designers use to compete and win the market? They should make continual development to improve every aspect of the product.

"and the question remains as to how individual designs come to be distinguished from related designs."

The problem comes out that how can one design be outstanding from other similar designs. We should look hard enough at the imperfections of related designs, avoid those imperfections and make improvements in our new design. For instance, laptops and cell phones can sometime function as part of audience response system. How can those devices outweight the benefits of clickers that are more popularized in ARS? Designers should detect shortcomings, limitations of clickers and investigate whether those imperfections can be avoided or improved with the use of laptops, cell phones.

Reference

Petroski, H. (1992). The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Vintage Books.

Chunk3

"The devices always come with instruction manuals, often big, thick, heavy ones, but these manuals are neither explanatory not intelligible."

The new generation of intelligient devices usually have complex features. People should clearly know how to operate it before actually using it. Instruction manuals of devices meet this demands of first-time users. Unfortunately, most instruction manuals are poorly designed. They are so big, thick and heavy that some people are even unwilling to open it, let alone carefully reading it. Most users prefer to know a brief introduction of a device's funtionality, usability, problems may occur and corresponding solutions rather than profound theory of how a device works. Not everyone wants to become a professional of such devices. Designers should consider offering alternative manuals for users, including small, thin, light ones that contain simple content and can be easily understood.

"Think of the brain as having three levels of processing: visceral, behaviroral and reflective."

Norman mentioned the three things as the levels of design in another book. I wonder whether they can also be applied to present levels of learning. Visceral (It is what nature does): abilities which people are born with. Behaviroal: people learn exsiting knowledge and apply what they learn to solve problems in daily life. Reflective: it is the level of creating new knowledge. It is based on continual practise in the behaviroal level. I am not sure whether I correctly interpret the three levels in this way. 

Reference

Norman, D. (2005). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Perseus Books Group.
Norman, D. (2007). The Design of Future Things. Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books.

Chunk2

"Well-designed animations may help students learn faster and easier." (wikipedia)

Animation is actually an influential tool when teachers come to explaining difficult, abstract theories to students. Animation provides a vivid introduction of what the item is so that students can have a better understanding. For example, when referring to Newton's law of universal gravitation, one teacher said "it  states that every massive particle in the universe attracts every other massive particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." while another teacher illustrated it with an animation. Obviously, after watching this animation we can get a conclusion that it is really an helpful tool to facilitate learning. 

We should also know the history of animation in order to make full use of it.

Chunk1

"Photographs of people may or may not help build trust in Web sites".
In my point of view, photographs of people cannot affect my trust towards web sites. I was surprised to find there were lots of photographs of people on universities' web sites when I was searching for admission requirements of my dream university in Canada. Maybe due to cultural difference, I was wondering why they prefer to use such kind of photos and I had never related it to building trust among viewers. I believe all the information university provides on the web site should be authentic, and it must be. Trust is built on the basis of reliable news, data, etc., not upon decorations like photos.

"Ensure that a Web site’s graphics add value and increase the clarity of the information on the site".

Note that use of images should be meaningful, not leading to adverse effect. When designing the classroom anti-distraction system, I used different background images on each page, trying to make it colorful. But after I read this chapter, I realize that too colorful interface may distract users. So I tend to design simple interface for the learning application.

Reference

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (2006). Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines.