Portfolio Design Rationale

Justification

This is my first time to open personal blog. I apply the theory "Three levels of Design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective" (Norman, 2004) into the design process. 

"At the visceral level, physical features---look, feel, and sound---dominate" (Norman, 2004). We love flowers because of the beautiful appearance, attractive smell, diverse style, etc. People love dressing up in parties, for they want to be the focus. So the way to make my blog impressive is to design a piece of beautiful clothes for it. Beautifying website is a complex task, but I can manage it under the help of various existing templates. The blogger provides different styles of templates and users can choose one that best suits individual's characteristics and content of the website. The content of my blog is about academic knowledge. I need a simple display instead of a colorful one that may distracts people's attention from useful knowledge to lovely template. As a result, I finally find a satisfactory template that looks like a piece of art (a cultural wall) on which some classic pictures hang. I think such a cultural atmosphere matches well with contents of my blog. 

Behavioral level focuses on how to perform well. "What matters here are four components of good behavioral design: function, understandability, usability, and physical feel" (Norman, 2004). One thing had puzzled me for a long time at the beginning of setting up this blog. Considering this blog is used in English-speaking environment, I chose google.ca as the searching engine instead of google.cn to guarantee that interface of this blog is all in English. But to my surprise, language format of the blog was still Chinese. Maybe it is due to the situation that I frequently use Chinese on this laptop, so the Internet Explorer automatically set Chinese as the default language. What's worse, I did not know how to change it. But I did need to switch language format to English for the reason of making sure my instructor, colleagues can successfully read, comment those reading responses, not be troubled by Chinese characters. Language difference is one of the factors that behavioral level (usability) should take into consideration. Fortunately, someone helped me solve this problem.

"Reflective level covers a very different thing, which is about the message a product sends to others" (Norman, 2004). In other words, it means viewers' general impression about my blog. I think visceral and reflective level have commons and differences. Both two of them focus on beauty, but the difference lies in that visceral level emphasizes beauty of the surface look of an object while reflective level stresses beauty from conscious reflection and experience, which seems superior to the former one-visceral level. In details, the former one concentrates on how this blog looks like, whereas the latter one puts effort on building high-quality knowledge, learning and culture. Beautifying the content of the blog is crucial and needs more work. Having learned of this, I tried my best to create critique ideas, add pictures, videos to support my arguments and enrich the blog.

Mission Statement

It is the very first time to have my blog. Before I had made up my mind several times to open a blog to record values in my lifetime, including happiness, sorrow, moving stories, but those plans all turned out to be disturbed by certain reasons. Now, the long-lasting dream is finally realized and seems to be more meaningful, beause I perfomed this in Canada, not in my motherland and all the posings are writtern in English not Chineses and the content is for my first class in Canada. Thanks to Dr. Michele for giving me access to this memorial blog to document my unforgettable learning process.

This blog is for the user-centered design course at the university of Calgary and it is made up of two main elements. Reading response presents my impressions, questions, interpretation of ideas about the assigned readings, interesting videos and my new way of thinking related to the educational technology. Course project reveals the novel technology-based prototype my group designs to solve learning problems and the process of how we pursue it. It is uesd as a incredible tool to record my progress, achivements, problems and puzzles during my study.

My instructor and colleagues are very welcome to view my blog, make comments, give advices and share individuals' experience. In the long term, I hope my blog can provide rich materials and be a forum of sharing creative thinkings associated with educational technology.