The beginning of March signals many things to different people: the welcome arrival of spring, NCAA March Madness, and the beginning of the MLB season. But for those who are participants and spectactors of the art world, March announces the beginning of international art fair season. According to Art Forum’s calendar listing for art fairs, […]
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The Repertory Grid Interview (RGI) is a technique related to Personal Construct Theory (PCT)—both were developed by George Kelly in 1955 in order to explore people’s conceptions of their relationships with others. PCT centers on the idea that every individual perceives the world based on constructs created from his or her unique experiences and understandings.
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This semester, I am enrolled in Pratt’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) class, and decided to compare my usability understanding with the DAM system development process. I first read three different articles that each approached the DAM usability topic differently. Monahan’s “DAM Good? Yes, It Can Be! – How to Make Users Love Your Digital Asset
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In the service of user experience, evaluation is many things. It can measure identifiable qualities of a system such as efficiency or ease of use. It can solicit emotional responses directly from the user. It checks users’ models of the system against the designers’. And, as we are learning, evaluation does all this in
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In Spring 2015, two students from my Usability Theory & Practice course (LIS 644) at Pratt Institute conducted separate cognitive walkthrough usability evaluations of a beta version of the Columbia Digital Library Collections interface (https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/). Student #1: Mike Benowitz Student #2: Andrew Ward Download Full Reports: Benowitz – Columbia DLC Cognitive Walkthrough Report (PDF) Ward – Columbia DLC Cognitive Walkthrough Report (PDF)
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Like many people, I spend a lot of time interacting with screens and being interrupted by various devices. I can’t remember the last time I went an hour without checking my phone, and I spend more time staring at pixels than looking at people. In this part of the world, we are never not connected,
The Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum reopened in December 2014 after a three- year renovation, which Sebastian Chan prefers to call a “reboot”. Chan, the Director of Digital and Emerging Technologies at the museum, recently discussed how the museum reconceptualized the way in which they communicated their collection to the public, as well as how they
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The Epson LabelWorks label printer is a device for typing and printing label stickers like the kind you’d stick on file cabinets or mail boxes in apartment buildings. The device’s design fails mainly in that it presents a system image that is both difficult to understand and far more complicated than the average user likely
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The doorbot is a both a physical device and an accompanying software application for mobile devices. In this post, I’m focusing on the physical device component as an example of good design. We bought the doorbot for our building when our buzzer system broke. The physical device mounts to the front of the building next to the
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Sky Guide, a star and constellation guide for iPhone is a brilliantly simple and intuitive app that adds a fun new dimension to stargazing for all ages. Sky Guide’s conceptual model perfectly aligns with the mental model of stargazing. Although Sky Guide provides no instructions when opened for the first time, users can instantly infer
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