EXP Weekly: Design Rant of the Week

Welcome to 440! Inspired by the example of "Norman Doors" from the first lecture, which showed us how even the most lightweight interactions can be poorly designed, we want you to find things you interact with regularly that you think are poorly designed.

Alternatively: is there a system or device you just dread interacting with? An object that bothers you every time you have to interact with it? Feel free to explore a lasting grudge like that here instead.

We don't expect you to have the language just yet to be able to perfectly describe what's wrong with a design, so for this Rant, focus on:

• What's the experience like interacting with this Thing? Describe your User Experience as best you can.
• What specific parts or attributes of the Thing make it unpleasant to interact with? Describe how you think they make the User Experience worse.

If you're having trouble coming up with ideas for this Rant, feel free to chat with the course staff-- we're happy to talk through ideas with you!

Submit via Canvas here: Canvas - EXP Rant of the Week

This week, we discussed how to thoughtfully engage in the process of Critique, and discussed the 'Ugly Baby Principle'– sometimes we're convinced our ideas are the best thing ever, when the truth is that they're not actually that great.

For this week's Rant, you'll have the chance to look back at something you've designed / built / created before, and ask the age-old question: is my baby... ugly?

Revisit something you've created in the past, ideally something you made while at UW but some time has passed since you made it. This can be a piece of code or software you wrote for a CSE course, an essay or project you crafted for a class, a creative piece you produced in any medium– as long as you put genuine effort into its creation, it's fair game. Ideally, pick something that, at the time of it's creation, you were really proud of; but maybe in retrospect, it wasn't as great as you thought. (At the very least, make sure you can see both positives AND negatives of what you created.)

Your prompt is:

Briefly describe your artifact and then write up a brief critique of it. Discuss what aspects of it "hold up" (i.e., what are the positives?) and what parts of it, in retrospect, could use some more work (i.e., what are the negatives?). Then, briefly describe the experience of critiquing your own design. If you recall how you previously felt about it: now that some time has passed, do you feel any differently about it, looking back with a lens of critique?

If you are so inclined and it's useful for communicating something, feel free to include a sample of the creation you're critiquing (with the knowledge that the course staff will not be reading an essay you wrote for your Intro to Composition course).

Your writeup should be between 1/2 page - 1 page long, in PDF format.

Submit via Canvas here: Canvas - EXP Rant of the Week

**Note: This prompt was posted a day late, so it can be submitted through the 24th instead of the expected deadline.

This week, we discussed the Design Diamond as a conceptual model for iterative design, emphasizing the importance of a "medium-sized diamond" that includes enough time spent on Elaboration but not too much.

Sometimes, people don't spend enough time coming up with ideas and just pick their first idea (or a comparably ill-informed early-stage idea). This often leads to immature designs that sound fine in theory, but don't work out great in practice.

For this Rant, you'll once again be looking out for designs in the world-- this time, for a design that are "good in theory, awful in practice". To judge this, we'll use the 'sounds good on paper' threshold: imagine a conversation where a designer is trying to describe their idea to someone, but leaves out a few key details that make the difference between 'sure, that could work!' and 'Bob, that's a horrible idea, I'm firing you from the design team' (or maybe just a milder 'that's a bad idea').

Your Rant must include:

• What Design you've selected (+ a picture, if you've got one!)
• The problem your selected design attempts to solve.
• The "Sounds Good on Paper" description of your selected design: a description of some aspects of the design that make it sound like it could actually solve the problem.
• The "Reality" description of the design: the "full picture" description of the design that causes it to actually not solve the problem.

Your selected design can be any specific object that was designed by someone (e.g., "the espresso machine at Starbucks" but not "coffee" or "the institution of Starbucks").

Your writeup should be between 1/2 page - 1 page long, in PDF format.

Submit via Canvas here: Canvas - EXP Rant of the Week

This week, you've learned how to do Design Research and begun to explore how to transform raw research data into design insights.

For this week's Rant, you'll be looking at the relationship between a design and its intended audience-- namely, you!

Pick a specific system, device, tool (etc.) that is (ostensibly) designed with you as a "typical user" in some aspect-- for example, an espresso machine for an avid coffee drinker, an IDE for a programmer, etc. However, your selected system should fall in one of two categories: "perfect for a user like me" or "awful for a user like me".

To explore this topic, begin by coming up with at least three typical "tasks" that a "user like you" would want to perform, which should highlight either the thoughtfulness of the design OR the carelessness of it. If you take the positive approach, describe what aspects of the design support you in effectively completing the task. If you take the negative approach, describe how the system fails to support you in this task.

Your rant should consist of:

• A brief description of your selected system, and what you feel makes you're a "typical" user of it.
• Three paragraphs each consisting of:
• An articulation of a task you want to be able to perform with the system
• Your description of how the system (in)effectively supports you in performing that task.

Your writeup should be between 1/2 page - 1 page long, in PDF format.

Submit via Canvas here: Canvas - EXP Rant of the Week

Get it? Because the learning curve is so steep?? ...whatever, *I* think I'm funny -J

This week, we've talked a lot about Tasks and the process of creating designs related to tasks that a User actually wants to complete. You also heard me rant about two common places where designs fail to support Task completion: Tutorials and Feature Discovery.

For this week's Rant, you'll be focusing on how designs teach the User how to interact with them– or, more likely, how some designs forget to support that part of the process.

Pick a system that you currently have some knowledge of how to operate, but can recall when you first had to learn how to use it. Ideally, this system should have some complexity to it– on the scale from a lamp (extremely simple) to Vim (extremely complex), you should be closer to the Vim side of things. Whatever system you choose, make sure it's demonstrative of terrible OR excellent design when it comes to teaching you how to use the system.

The prompt this week is simple: What made the process of learning to interact with this system so exceptionally good or bad?

Be sure to include:

• A brief description of your selected system.
• A description of what your experience was learning to use the system: what worked? what went wrong?
• A critique of the design itself: what aspects of the system supported your learning? where could the system have been improved to make it easier to learn?

Your writeup should be between about 1 page long, in PDF format. Please include the name or week number of the prompt you're responding to at the top of your document.

Submit via Canvas here: Canvas - EXP Rant of the Week

Note: we're working out some bugs in how Canvas handles multiple submissions on the same assignment; thanks for your patience on that, and please let us know if you think we missed something. In the meantime, it'd be really helpful if you could please leave a comment on the Assignment Comments when you upload your response to indicate that you submitted something.

I'll be real, at this point I'm intentionally naming these as bad puns for my own amusement -J

This week, we've talked about how to effectively communicate your work by considering your audience.

For this week's Rant, you'll have a chance to reflect on the best and the worst presentations from the people who get paid to do it: namely, your professors.

Now I'm gonna say this explicitly up front: please do not include any identifying info about who you're talking about in your submission. It's certainly useful to reflect on the work of others, but we're separating the design from the designer here and just talking about the presentation itself.

For this Rant, think of a 'high' and a 'low': a lecture-based class, talk, or specific lecture that was exceptionally compelling and effective and one that left quite a bit to be desired. Be mindful your selections aren't just 'a topic you like' and 'a topic you don't like'– really consider how the content was presented. Frankly, a compelling talk on a topic you don't care about is probably a great example of effective communication, and a 'I was excited about this but just wound up bored and disappointed' is a great example of the opposite.

The prompt this week is: what can you learn about communication from these experiences?

Be sure to include:

• A description of each talk with just enough detail to explain your experience without deanonymizing the subject / putting anyone on blast.
• Tip: Focus on what you were feeling alongside what the presenter was doing. Were there specific parts of the talk that affected you more (for better or worse)?
• For the good talk: what made it so good? Provide one or two takeaways that you can apply to your own presentations in the future.
• For the bad talk: what made it so bad? Provide one or two shortcomings that you can be careful to avoid in your own presentations in the future.

Your writeup should be between about 1 page long, in PDF format. Please include the name or week number of the prompt you're responding to at the top of your document.

Submit via Canvas here: Canvas - EXP Rant of the Week

Note: we're working out some bugs in how Canvas handles multiple submissions on the same assignment; thanks for your patience on that, and please let us know if you think we missed something. In the meantime, it'd be really helpful if you could please leave a comment on the Assignment Comments when you upload your response to indicate that you submitted something.