Design

Design for Health

Posted by Brian

PKyoU is a dietary management, analytics, and educational web application for adults with phenylketonuria (PKU). The application allows users to track and monitor their nutritional intake, and check the suitability of specific food items for the PKU diet. It also includes an educational component that allows users to increase their nutritional awareness through gamified learning.

The goal of this project was to design some type of assistive solution that helps enable independent living for persons with chronic illness, cognitive disabilities, or language barriers. The goal was to design a solution that is both desirable and usable, and that also considers the social, emotional, physical, and behavioral characteristics and lifestyles of the target audience.

Course: Visual Design for Human-Computer Interaction

Project PDF: EnableIT Project Report

Design for Social Inclusion

Posted by Brian

The goal of the project was to design an educational play experience intended to mediate social interactions between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children and neurotypical children ages 6 to 12 years. Additionally, the project was meant to focus on the critical social and language skills needed by the target group, while not being branded as an “autism” product. Overall, the designed experience was supposed to be fun, interesting, and beneficial for both ASD children and their neurotypical peers.

I decided that a browser-based game would be appropriate, since research indicates that computing applications have been successfully used to teach specific communication and social skills to autistic children. The result was Tiki-Tak-Totem, an interactive, two-player, tic-tac-toe-style browser game targeted to children in the 6-8 age group.

Course: Visual Design for Human-Computer Interaction

Project PDF: PlayIT Project Report 

On Norman

Posted by Brian

Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things is a classic in the design world. He uses simple case studies and proposes simple principles that we all already know through the mundane experience of existing and interacting with objects and artifacts.

We are people. We use things. Sometimes these things don’t work the way they should, or the way we think they should, so we need people like Don Norman to explain why.

Sometimes good design is a product of research and a deep understanding of form and function, and sometimes it’s just a happy accident. We can study it forever, but sometimes good design is nothing more than a minor modification of something that almost worked in the first place. That’s called innovation.

I love Norman’s book because he simply and beautifully illustrates some great points, and he coins a few good words that have become part of the design and user experience lexicon.

I don’t know if Norman’s book ever made me think differently about how things are designed, but it has certainly served to justify my outrage about poor design. Whenever I open a “re-sealable” package that doesn’t actually re-seal, I think of Don Norman. If nothing else, Norman got a lot of people thinking that even the simplest things that frustrate us because of their inherently poor design can be improved, if we bothered to care about improving such things.