Reading notes for Seminar 1 - Johan Lindeberg

While reading through the assigned chapters in our course book I had the recurring thoughts "Well that's obvious" or "This is just common sense". A few examples would be

• To not overly complicate things, 
• Take input and point of view from clients, stakeholders colleagues, teammates etc.
• That the brief should be just a starting point.
• Genius design is best practiced by experienced designers.
• That you can only hold so much information in your memory (The Magical Number Seven).
• Placing a button at the edge of the screen makes it easier to click (Fitts' Law).
• Putting constraints on products to prevent errors (Poka-Yoke).

These statments all seem rather intuitive to me. However, as I think back of how I've approached problems in the past (working with developing webpages and tools for Swedish middle school students studying spanish), these points is not something I have focused on. Instead I've mostly listned to my boss telling me that he wants this functionallity, and then just implementing it without giving too much thought towards the end user. This is something I will try to put more focus on in my work as well as during this course, and it's well summarized in a quote from the Summary of chapter 3: "..we should never forget who these products and services are for: the users". 

As for our project, and the upcoming interviews, some things we should keep in mind is:

• Let the interviewee know who we are, what we are doing and why
• Be well prepared (recording equipment, pens, paper, what we are going to ask)
• Letting the interviewee speak for herself (Awkward pauses can be a good thing!)
• Asking "Why?"

After we have conducted the interviews, we will have to brainstorm ideas. Some good points to keep in mind is to start off with a warm-up exercise to get engaged before generating ideas, to brainstorm for not more than two hours, to not spend a lot of time on one idea - rather generate as many ideas as possible and to use the space you have available (sketching or writing down ideas on paper, placing them on the walls or tables so you can see them.

Walking even further down the road of our project, we arrive at prototyping, and a valuable point brought up in the article Key principles for user-centred systems design is that - just as for brainstorming - using a lot of quick sketches and mockups is a great way to support the creative process. Also that producing many prototypes in parallel lets you keep a creative mindset.

Question: As we have no real brief (or a very vague one) for this project, how will we define our product?