Designing my future

How will this class impact my career? I am not sure how to describe the current state of most government websites and publications – but I will let it stand that we need all the help we can get. When I first started at my current position, the first thing I did was begin redesigning all of our print products only to realize that graphic design, and the principles necessary to successfully design a product, is much harder than it looks! I’ve always enjoyed reading about design and how typefaces and colors are chosen, but once it was up to me to choose them it seemed an almost impossible task. Add to that the requirements to ensure everything is accessible and easy to use – and I found myself over my head quickly.

But more than just the books about type and the guidelines concerning design, the most important thing I’ve learned in the class is the concept of iterative design and how to problem solve using those principles. At my current employer, we have undertaken a “Systems Redesign” project that reminds me in some ways of iterative design. What I’ve learned, and what I will take with me is the framework to take lots of ideas and apply them, with guidelines and constraints, toward a singular goal.

The most profound point I am taking away was mentioned in the film “Objectified”: That everything we see and everything we buy and everything we interact with is a choice. A designer, or a team of designers, chose those colors, materials and shapes to make the products we surround ourselves with. Of course this is true, but really who thinks of that when they go to Target? The ideas that things just don’t magically work without a lot of forethought and design was an absent thought to me – I am fortunate to live in the United States where I’ve always been surrounded by items that just work. If they don’t, they were just replaced.

Now that I am having to make more design choices, I find myself questioning why I pick a color or a layout or a photo instead of just going by feel – and this will prove, I believe, to be the most valuable skill I will possess. Although I need to refine my tastes and practice setting colors and layouts against one another, I find few people (even designers!) who will go back and ask why certain words are used or why specific typefaces are used.

The ability to combine the iterative design process with the patience to examine the choices behind elements will, I hope, make me a valuable addition to any creative team. On a side note, my facility has two in-house graphic designers who, generally speaking, really do a good job. They are both artistically inclined and create very nice products. But, what I feel is keeping us from the next level is the ability to look at a design and determine the why behind each element. I hope to take some of the principles (especially in the Maeda book) we’ve gone through and encourage our designers to apply them to their own designs.

Finally, how I think this class will help my career is in the ability to differentiate my work by being able to recognize good elements and incorporate them into my own work. It’s one thing to see trends in online design (which is where more and more of my work is going) but another altogether to mix them into something original and inspiring. Government design has to be accessible, but not boring.

 

Updated Project Proposal

Shane Suzuki

Interactive Design Practice

Winter 2011

Project Proposal – www.publicaffairsonline.com

Product Description: www.publicaffairsonline.com, or PA Online, would be a free, online home for content producers and public affairs officers across the nation to share ideas, content and lessons designed specifically for government workers.

Background: Government public relation offices (called Public Affairs Offices or PAO) have recently experienced a shift toward embracing digital communication technologies. However, most of the government work force is older and was trained in traditional PR techniques and are quickly finding themselves unable to use the latest communication tools.

Due to the non-competitive nature of government employment (at least in a profits driven business sense) PAOs are more likely to work together and share ideas across agencies and offices. However, the lack of time and experience, combined with an embedded culture of isolation makes this sharing of ideas and products almost non-existent.

This website would provide a place for experienced PAOs to share their institutional knowledge while encouraging new PAOs to teach the technological skills necessary to compete in an interconnected world.

Design Strategy Components:

Business Goals
- Reduce training costs
- Production Software (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite)
- Proprietary ECMS (InterWoven Teamsite)
- PAO 101 (Media handling, press release examples, policy examples)
- Increase productivity by reducing production errors

Target Users
- Government Public Affairs Officers, content producers and webmasters

General Tasks
- Provide forums for topical discussion and virtual networking
- Upload and downloading of templates and lessons
- Stock image repository
- Video Tutorials
- Repository of policies and procedures

Technological Constraints
- Hosting costs
- Government IT blocks on certain websites
- Ensure compatibility with Microsoft IE, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari

Marketing/Branding Goals
- Engaging content
- Create sense of community across wide geographic region
- Where “Smart PAOs go for info”
- Cutting edge tips and tricks

Critical Success Factors
- Membership from all 15 cabinet level agencies
- Upward trend in participation metrics (forum posts and template uploads)
- Increase quality of government websites

Deliverables

1. Detailed personas

- a 50 something woman with lots of PA experience but little technology knowledge

- a 40 something male with some computer knowledge but little practical experience in web tech

- and a 30 something male with loads of technical skill but little PA experience

2. Wireframes of main pages

- Homepage

- Forum page

- Tutorials page

- Video tutorial

- File resources

- Regular article/news page

3. Survey results of PAOs in the field

4. Need Analysis/Case Study of Agency PAO needs

Project Proposal – Public Affairs Online

Project Proposal – www.publicaffairsonline.com (not currently active)

Product Description: www.publicaffairsonline.com, or PA Online, would be a free, online home for content producers and public affairs officers across the nation to share ideas, content and lessons designed specifically for government workers.

Background: Government public relation offices (called Public Affairs Offices or PAO) have recently experienced a shift toward embracing digital communication technologies. However, most of the government work force is older and was trained in traditional PR techniques and are quickly finding themselves unable to use the latest communication tools.

Due to the non-competitive nature of government employment (at least in a profits driven business sense) PAOs are more likely to work together and share ideas across agencies and offices. However, the lack of time and experience, combined with an embedded culture of isolation makes this sharing of ideas and products almost non-existent.

Design Strategy Components:

Business Goals

- Reduce training costs
- Increase productivity by reducing production errors

Target Users

- Government Public Affairs Officers, content producers and webmasters

General Tasks

- Forums with email digests of conversations
- Upload and downloading of templates and lessons
- Stock image repository
- Video Tutorials
- Repository of policies and procedures

Technological Constraints

- Hosting costs
- Government IT blocks on certain websites

Marketing/Branding Goals

- Engaging content
- Create sense of community across wide geographic region
- Where “Smart PAOs go for info”
- Cutting edge tips and tricks

Critical Success Factors

- Membership from all 15 cabinet level agencies
- Upward trend in participation metrics (forum posts and template uploads)
- Increase quality of government websites

UW Library App Wireframes and Sitemap

What an engaging title! Anyhow, here are my sitemap and wireframe drawings. Because it’s a mobile app, our group decided to keep it very, very simple. The basic ideas are all there – search for media, make reservations, find locations, manage accounts – but kept to their bare bones.

Games and design – Keep it simple and fun

For this first assignment, I played three games – Wii Baseball, Angry Birds for WebOS and Blow Things Up from www.addictinggames.com. All of them are fun and all of them are very simple games that require very little skill or puzzle solving, although to achieve high scores a certain amount of puzzle solving must be used in Angry Birds and Blow Things Up. I didn’t get to play the dancing game for the Kinect, but I did watch a couple of other people.

The simplest of the games was the Flash game Blow Things Up. The rules are simple – place bombs to knock the bad guys from the platforms. Advanced stages require some strategic placement of the bombs to destroy certain platforms or keep the good guys from falling, but generally speaking, the game play is very simple, very fast and very fun.

I liked it because there was little ambiguity concerning the gameplay. The controls were simple, the goals explicit and the feedback almost instantaneous. I was never left wondering what to do next or how to advance the levels. After playing through the 42 stages, there was an incentive to go back and play again – try to earn trophies for solving the puzzles in a more efficient way.

The next simplest game was Angry Birds. I’ve never played the more popular iPhone or Android version, but from what I can tell the basics are the same – using birds with a variety of abilities, sling shot them to destroy the castles of the pigs and destroy them. It sounds silly, but the game is addicting and fun.

Once again, what made this game great is the simplicity – destroy the pigs, whose castles get more complex as the game goes along. There are few options to change the gameplay, which adds to the instant playability of the game. My five year old figured out the game within minutes. Also making it well designed was the instant feedback. Players are never left wondering if they are succeeding or not –the requirements to advance in the game are simple and easily determined.

The final game I played was Wii Baseball. I have played it before, as I own the game, but once I looked at the design of the game, I was amazed at how much I just took for granted. For example – the menu system is atrocious. Confirming confirmations is not only annoying, but degrading to the user. The menu buttons are well designed and frankly hard to miss with the wiimote. To assume that I am consistently selecting the wrong action is annoying.

As for gameplay – the game is fun and easy to understand even for people not interested in baseball (or wildly intoxicated). By taking out all the gameplay functions except the most impactful (pitching and hitting) and letting the computer control the fielding and base running (which in most baseball games are the most difficult and frustrating portions) the designers opened up the gameplay to non-gamers.

That said, the game play is quick enough and the scoring innovative enough that even novice gamers would find a reason to come back and play again. Unlike the other two games though, Wii Baseball does have a limit –serious sports gamers will probably want more control over their characters and the gameplay, while also increasing the difficulty of the game. But, as a free game included with the console which is partly designed to help players get used to a new control system, it succeeds.

As for the readings and just design in general – I like many of the design principles as general rules for problem solving – not just interaction or graphics. The basic ideas of keeping things simple and keeping the user in mind are good rules of thumb for just about any project, which is something I feel like I can use at work (which is nice)!

Flow charts – I will add them soon. I started this process on Visio, but soon grew frustrated and am going to use a different program. Charting baseball is very complex, even for Wii Baseball with its simpler interactions.

Telling a story and making a sandwich

For this assignment we had to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end in two minutes with only in-camera edits.

How I view shopping with my wife

First, I love my wife. Second, I generally hate shopping. Third – this was my last video for my Digital Storytelling class. Hopefully I will have more time in the future to continue to make home movies and funny vignettes. A huge thank you to Jim, Li and Derek for being great teammates and developing a wonderful theme -



Week 9 Comments

Almost at the end! I got home and said to my wife “I wish I could just keep going to school, but just not do the work. I just like listening to smart people talk about the smart things they do.”

Tonight’s guest was fantastic, if for no other reason than I am beginning to develop the process at my office on creative development and design will be happening from now on. It’s not every class that I can take someting directly from class to work the next day and actually implement something I learned.

Anyway – off to finalize my script for my final video this weekend – salut!

Back to the Future!

No fancy graphics or music this time, I hate when real life gets in the way of fun projects! Instead, just a commentary about how everything new is old again…

Shine a little light on me

This week’s readings lean toward the paranoid, no? Although the technology mentioned in the article has changed and many of the companies they marked as leaders in content delivery have been usurped; the basic claims have not changed. Advances in content delivery have a consequence: anonymity is lost.

The concept is simple: Content on demand services are at their heart server/terminal relationships. This means that the user doesn’t have any content, just a terminal with network access that has the ability to display content from a remote server. Anytime you are connecting to a server, you are leaving records of what you requested. Anytime you are leaving electronic records, companies are analyzing them and developing profiles.

What’s different now, as opposed to 20 or 30 years ago when data mining techniques went into the mainstream, is that instead of just general demographic mapping based on gender, location, income, etc; one-to-one data mapping can be done based on the logs of your online activity.

Examples of this include Amazon’s “You Might Also Like”, Netflix’s “Suggestions for you” or Facebook ads. By using the choices and preferences of their massive user base, they are better able to target products and services to their users resulting in more targeted (and in theory more effective) ads.

The convergence of technologies though, that we are adjusting to. We sort of expect our privacy to be invaded online and when we subscribe to magazines and when we register to win free windows at the mall. But television was always ours, it was always private and it was always our business if we watched nothing but the Jersey Shore or the Maury Povich show.

However scary these articles (TV That Watches You and Tapping into TiVo) make our collective privacy invasion seem, both of the articles come woefully short of predicting anything like the profiling carnival we have now.

When these articles were written, content was still defined by its medium – radio was transmitted over fm and am bands, television via cable or television bands, books as, well, books, movies and music by physical media such as CDs and DVDs. But that has changed – ohh boy has that changed. Starting with music and podcasts, everything has been redefined as digital data and nothing more. Anymore, the only reason we call things television shows or movies is for traditions sake.

With AppleTV, GoogleTV, Windows Media Center and video game consoles that are networkable, the internet (and all digital content) is now available on our primary consumption device – the television. Never before have so many mediums been so immediately traceable through one mechanism. As almost everything we do moves online, therefore all our consumer behavior becomes analyzable and comparable.

SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

It means that people are starting to get worried about who is collecting what information. Just recently, the Federal Trade Commission began floating the idea of creating a “Do Not Track” list which would limit the ability of online marketers to track all the sites we visit online. But the issue is greater than just a do not track list. The ability to actively monitor all data, regardless of type is at best a boon to marketers and at worst an invasion of privacy only heard of in 1984 and Google Street View (cheap joke).  There is no doubt that marketing and advertising has become incredible specific and more effective than ever. Amazon always knows what I want, Netflix suggestions are very, very good and the ability for Google and Bing to match searches to ads is often amazing.

But at what cost? Who actually knows what about who? After decades of operating in a wild-west like internet, we are slowly coming to a realization that the internet is a business and is run by people who are trying to make money. Servers and fiber are tangible assets that cost loads of money to install and run, while designers, content producers are real people who spend real time to make real products. Perhaps the economy is changing and many of the functions are being done by people willing to work for less than in previous economies, but these costs are real and business expectations haven’t changed quick enough to effectively change these operating costs.

In terms of protecting privacy, Europe is ahead of the United States – but at the cost of more government monitoring and restriction of online speech (See Italy vs. YouTube). As I see it though, it’s not that we are terribly worried about the information being out there, we’ve been giving away information freely since the first credit cards. It’s that for the first time we are starting to understand just how massive these data collection efforts are and that our actions online do have real world implications and consequences.

I have no idea if internet companies are inherently good or bad, but in the end it doesn’t matter. What I do know is that they have stockpiles of information on my browsing and purchasing habits. They know what I like to read, what I seem to agree with politically, what I buy for myself (and probably what I buy for others) and a host of other things I probably can’t even imagine. What has changed is that, for some reason, I and a lot of other people now care that the people behind the curtain of the internet do have that information.

I am not sure how to fix it, or if this is just the price of living in our new high-speed culture. Either way, raising awareness can only help shine a light on a dark part of the internet that until recently, was hidden.