Janet Chang’s Blog about Design

Designing your reputation system

August 25, 2008 – 5:14 pm
Designing Your Reputation Systemview presentationtags: patterns karma levels points Bryce Glass, Sr. Interaction Designer at Yahoo!, shared his presentation on building reputation system at the 2008 IA Summit. Highlights from the slide presentation: Yahoo! Design Pattern Library: Reputation Patterns Define your business goals Drive user engagement Promote a specific feature Acknowledge top contributors Increase content quality Promote user retention Community Spirit The Competitive Spectrum Caring (i.e. Support Groups, A Live Journal blog) Collaborative (i.e. Wikipeida, dating sites) Cordial (i.e. Yahoo! Answers, Message Boards) Competitive (i.e. Fantasy Sports, Casual Gaming) Combative (i.e. Halo on Xbox Live, Hot or Not) People write reviews Self-interest Interest in others Interest in the Object being rated Entities accrues reputation People (video, blog posts, bookmarks, article submissions, collections, playlists, message board post, reviews, social objects) Content Takeaways Rate the thing, not the person Beware of ambiguity in semantic Contexts should generally be as specific as necessary, but still general enough to apply widely

Posted in Design Patterns, Events and Conferences, Interaction Design, User Research | No Comments »

Inspiring talk by Hans Rosling

August 24, 2008 – 9:30 am
Global health expert Hans Rosling’s presentation on debunking third-world myths with Gapminder. Developed by Hans himself, Gapminder shines new meaning into stats and set right myths due to preconceived ideas. More on Hans Rosling and his contributions here.

Posted in Data Visualization, Events and Conferences | No Comments »

About Causal Gamers

July 28, 2008 – 7:40 pm
Paul Thelen ( Founder of Big Fish Games) presented casual game study industry findings performed by Big Fish Games in partnership with NPD Group. The study focused in US market with emphasis on the casual portion of the gaming industry. During the keynote, Paul presented the14 distinct gamer groups. Of the 14 segments, Heavy Action, Slow Strategists, Fantasy Worlds, and Virtual Life are “Core” gamer groups, the rest are “Casual” groups. Core gamers are also considered as the target audience as the study showed there’s a overlapping 58% of gamer play both casual and core games. Gamer profile - Nancy Drews Older female gamers that prefer to play alone and like to think, relax and rejuvenate. Primary Genres: - Match 3 Puzzle Games - Brain Teasers/Logic Games - Mahjong - Word games - Hidden Object Puzzles - Jigsaw Puzzle Games - Trivia Games - Puzzle Adventure Key Findings: - 63% female - 59% over 35 - Highest concetration of retirees and unemployed but not looking for work - Over-represented in Old School and Clicker segments - Least likely ...

Posted in User Research | No Comments »

Keynote: Disaggregating the Casual Game Industry

July 27, 2008 – 9:41 pm
At last week’s Casual Connect Seattle (23-25 July, 2008), Paul Thelen, The Founder, Chairman and CSO of Big Fish Games, spoke about the key findings on diversity and complexity of casual game industry in the US market. Finding 1: Segmenting gamers into two buckets is misleading Finding 2: Combining Casual and Core gamers, there are 14 distinct segments. Nancy Drews, Old School, Heavy Action (Core), Spongebobs, Whimsical, Clickers, Frenetics, Tycoons, King of Kongs, Slow Strategists (Core), Dancers, Fantasy World (Core), Kid Worlds, Virtual Life (Core). Details and comparison of main gamer profiles in a later post. Finding 3: This business is complex 14 customer segments 17 Platforms PC, Mac, Mobile Phone, Touch Phone, PDA , Xbox 360, XBLA, Playstation 2/3, PSP, Wii, Gameboy, DS, WiWare, IPTV, In-flight entertainment, Basic Browser, Social Networks 10 business models Pay-per-day, Try-and-buy, Multi-game subscription to won, Multi-game subscription to rent, Advertising supported, Advergames, Micro-transaction item sales, Single game subscription, Skill game wagering, ...

Posted in User Research | No Comments »

Most commonly asked localization question

May 26, 2008 – 9:50 am
People are often curious how localization deal with Asian languages that’s traditionally written and read vertically from right to left. It’s a valid question and not often one can get a solid answer. I was involved in several localization projects, the most recent one in Japanese. Being a native Chinese speaker, the discussion and examples here will be Chinese-specific. Historically, the right to left convention Traditional Chinese manuscripts and letters are written right to left. The characters can be written both vertically and horizontally. This is the more traditional writing style. Readers associate this writing style with formality, tradition, and authority. Then comes the left to right convention Influenced by Western languages, left to right writing is now widely accepted. The layout is more flexible especially when parts of the content are displayed in Western languages. This layout is perceived as more modern or informal. When I was researching for this topic, ...

Posted in Content | No Comments »

3 UX errors Sender Address Verification will cause you your clients

May 5, 2008 – 9:25 am
A co-worker referred me to his agent for refinance. I wrote to the agent’s email. Within 5 minutes, I received a reply. Upon reading the email, I realized it’s an automatic reply for verify my email address. That was totally not what I expected. This sucks. 1. Poorly written copy The email was long, too long to hold my attention. It started by explaining the reason I’m getting the automatic email instead of a real agent’s reply was because Sender Address Verification (SAV) implementation. The information I spent 5 minutes reading was irrelevant to my original intent and it's hindering me from getting to what I want (info on refinance). 2. Lack of sincerity and proper tone Although I was ensured that my message is very important to them, I fund myself not convinced and was frustrated for being talked down. Like me, they hate spamming too. So I should be ...

Posted in Bad Designs, Case Studies, Content | No Comments »

Edward Tufte lecture materials

March 16, 2008 – 9:16 pm
In July, 2007, I attended Edward Tufte’s “Presenting Data and Information” one-day lecture. For me, that was one of the most in depth introduction to the techniques of data presentation. At the time I was playing with 37singlas' document managament and file sharing tool “Backpack”. Naturally I created a page uploading notes from the course to share with fellow designers. The notes contain details such as takeaways, bullets, and were accompanied with correlated graphs and book references. To transfer the entire content from Backpack to Wordpress would be quite a labor-intensive task. However, feel free to check out my Edward Tufte lecture page in Backpack. A side note to share my experience using Backpack. The success of Backpack has a lot to do with its simplicity and flexibility. Two crucial and rare characteristics many products are lacking.

Posted in Lectures, Visual Design | No Comments »

Puget Sound SIGCHI February Event at Google Seattle office

February 29, 2008 – 1:15 am
Tonight’s Puget Sound SIGCHI event was hosted by Google at its Fremont office. The location wasn’t new to Tab and I. 4 years ago, we both worked for the same design firm. The firm’s office was at the very same location Google’s at now. We arrived early enough to find ourselves a decent spot. There was even time for a quick tour to Googl’e usability lab and eye tracking device. The speaker tonight was Jake Knapp, UI designer at Google. Jake shared his typical day at work and how things got done in this fast pace and engineer-driven culture. His talking points were pretty straight forward, and were already adapted by companies practicing Agile Development Manifesto. One tip particularly got me interested was the importance of presentation to UX professionals. How design concept is conveyed to the entire team and generate great feedback relied heavily on designers’ ability to ...

Posted in Design Process, Events and Conferences, Eye Tracking | No Comments »

Washington Department of Licensing Website Redesign

February 22, 2008 – 1:57 pm
Suzanne Boyd and Emma Rose from Anthro-Tech talked about their usability research methodologies when they were commissioned by the Washington Department of Licensing for its Website redesign project in 2005. Step 1- Discovering users’ mental models Users’ mental models dictate how they look for information. When the information architecture reflects users mental models, they can find what they need. Methods and Analyze the data: A combination of card sort study Content ranking – to find out what users care about most. (Descriptive data analyze) Card sort - to see how users group content (cluster analysis. From there, a category labels are produced which turn into thematize data analyze) Focus group – to understand why users organized it that way and what doesn’t fit. (code it and summarize data analyze) Findings on users’ mental models Strong mental model (information users are familiar about the site) Groupings to topics (vehicles, licensing) Task based (renew, replace, update) Life events (move, start a ...

Posted in Case Studies, Prototyping, Usability Testing, User Research | No Comments »

Having fun with Yahoo! My Travel

February 14, 2008 – 11:25 pm
Running into Yahoo’s personalize travel site was entirely an accident. I was goggling for some travel information. One of the links led me to Yahoo’s travel destination page. The information was somewhat useful. But things started to get interesting when I noticed an “Add to Trip” feature by the destination info. Since I’m collecting information on several locations, and I would like to compare them under one common area. I started adding photos and information I came across. Before I knew it, I’ve compiled a list of destinations. They were also pinpointed on a map view. And later when I did a search on airline prices and saved one of the better deals, it too showed up in My Trip. My travel plan was putting together all by itself without me realizing it! Knowing my travel plan started to take shape, I was ready to invest more time into this unknown ...

Posted in Case Studies, Findability, Visual Design | 1 Comment »