Janet Chang’s Blog about Design

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 »

UX challenges at Google

February 8, 2008 – 10:40 pm
Carolyn Wei, User Experience Researcher at Google, shared the 5 UX challenges Google facing to make useful, desirable, and delightful products. Challenge 1. Understanding our users These different sources of information provide different part of the story at different stages. User experience research Logs Customer support Quantitative market research Live online experiments (A/B tests) Challenge 2. Consistency Consistency is to reinforce the brand Consistency reduce learning curve All products should be distinct from each other, but look like they belong to each other Challenge 3. Integration Currently there are over 40 Google products available. How to make these products meaningful to users by joining products in a sensible way? Example 1: Google search and map integration Think like a user. Someone can search on movie showtimes and also get the theater locations. Example 2: Gmail integration with chat feature It’s all about communicating and finding someone, whether by email or by online chat. Challenge 4. Localization Facts: 70% of all Internet users speak a primary ...

Posted in Lectures, User Research | No Comments »

Documenting instrumentation

January 11, 2008 – 10:12 pm
Tim Briggs, Senior User Experience Researcher at Microsoft Office Design Group did a seminar in the “Current Issues in Technical Communication” lecture. He talked about the process of software instrumentation through case study on Office 2007 development. What is Documenting instrumentation? The ability to track people’s clicks. Which is essentially the topic of this lecture – “How your mouse clicks redefine Microsoft Office”. Instrumentation is the ability of a device placed in the field to provide measurement and/or control capabilities for the system. Devices like black box and tubes used to measure traffic on the roads are passive implementation of data tracking; Copiers notify users when toner is running low is active data tracking; as for Microsoft Office, the product is designed as an adapt data notifyer. What is it to Microsoft Office? Instrumentation guided the redesign of Office through each stage. Instrumentation represent real use (users’ behaviors using the software). ...

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Usability Resources

September 12, 2007 – 9:41 am
Patterns Library Welie.com specializes in patterns in interaction design, their patterns library cover a wide range of patterns common to current online interaction interface http://www.welie.com/patterns/ Apple Human Interface Guidelines From design process, characteristics of a successful software, to user experience with Apple products, this is the designer must-read of UI design. Link to Apple Human Interface Guidelines

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A design story: making of a sweatshirt

September 11, 2007 – 9:45 am
Last month there was an unofficial contest between designers to come up with a sweatshirt design for employees that are going to a 7-day company paid Alaska cruise. We don’t get to do lots of print projects these days, not to mention something as cool as wearable. I had even more incentives because I was going to the trip and naturally I wanted my sweatshirt to look GOOD. Narisa and I had a brief brainstorming and came up with 3 design concepts. First design was vintage travel posters inspired, illustration of traditional woodprint line art style featuring Alaska snowy mountains and forest scene on the backdrop, and our company mascot Felix at foreground. Second one was spine off of the classic “I LOVE NY”, with love appears the shape of heart. The third one is Tiki party drink. The design is a Mai Tai cup with a little cocktail ...

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SIGGRAPHY 07 electronic theater highlights

August 21, 2007 – 2:31 pm
Tab attended this year’s SIGGRAPHY and brought back some exciting news and trends in the computer graphic world. She ran a lunch brownbag to share some of the noticeable short films playing in this year’s electronic theater. Of all the short films we sampled, my personal favorite is CodeHunter by MTV (animation created by Axis Animation). One of the game artists said there’s a CodeHunter game in the making. It’s a shame most games based on hit tv shows or movies don’t live up to its original creations. If you are interested, the complete playlist is available on YouTube. As a bonus, Tab did a quick demo on “PLASMA PONG”. It’s classic pong with a twist of techno music, interactive screen saver, and physics. I enjoyed the music so much I downloaded a version to my Mac.

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Web 2.0 Tutorials Round-Up

March 12, 2007 – 8:28 pm
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/03/10/web-20-tutorials-round-up/ A plethora of tutorials to make pretty graphics and shinny buttons. But what’s with the title “web 2.0”? I almost deleted it at the first glance when this is forwarded to me from a co-worker. Gotta exercise with caution when applying buzzword.

Posted in Visual Design, Websites | No Comments »

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

April 13, 2006 – 1:41 pm
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/index.php This is an excellent resource of development terminologies and solutions to common user interface problems (known as Pattern).

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