uxmelina

Although I prefer XKCD, Dilbert comics are classic! I found this little gem today, and wanted to share it here! Check it out! I don’t know if I can pick my favourite, they are all so funny and true!

Which is your favourite?

Today, I took part in the “The Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer“, a ceremony taken by many students who complete accredited engineering programs in Canada. The ceremony involved making a moral, ethical and professional commitment to my profession. I was “wedded to cold iron” (as they say), when given an iron ring to wear on my pinky finger of my working hand. This ring acts as a reminder of this commitment.

The ethical obligation held by more traditional engineering disciplines is clear. If a civil engineer doesn’t act ethically, and fails to design a bridge safely, then people could, and likely would, be harmed when it fails.

Can ethics have as important outcome in UX design? I say yes! It may not be as obvious at first, especial to people just starting out in the feild (such as myself), but I saw this talk last week (shown below) and it started to make me think. Robert Fabricant talks about IxD, I recommend watching the whole thing, but around the half way point he talks about the difference between output, outcome, and impact of design. I understand it as the result on the project level, user level, and society level. He uses the example of purity pledges with Evangelicals. I will summarize his distinction in his example.

Output (project level) : purity pledges, purity balls, rings (as designed)

Outcome (user level): teens taking the pledge, father’s giving rings to daughters (as designed)

Impact (society level): Higher teen pregnancy in Evangelical (not intended design)

It’s the impact where ethics really come into play. As shown with the purity pledge, if designers don’t consider this level fully, it becomes clear of the unethical results that can occur with a design. Robert talks about the need for an “impact model” similar to business models used for new ideas.

Since an impact model doesn’t really exist right now, can you think of any methods to determine an impact model or elements that an ideal model would have?

Robert Fabricant - Behavior is our Medium from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Have you ever wanted your television to do more?

That was the starting point to the design of SocialTV, the redesign of the television experience. It’s been 8 months in the making, as my 4th year Systems Design project. The amount of work that has gone into it is incredible, and I’m extremely proud of the work my design partner, Katie Cerar, and I have been able to do. I got these fun ideo method cards for my birthday last summer, and they really fueled some fun research including:

- “Fly on the Wall” Ethnography style studies <-watching people watch TV is really boring, but fun!
- Card sorts
- Contextual Inquiry
- “Draw on the Experience” <- users mark up really low fidelity initial designs
- Formal user testing
- Surveys <- a bit boring but good to see trends.
-the list goes on and on….

To analyse all the data we did all sorts of other fun stuff

- coding methods
- affinity diagrams
- social network mapping
- error analysis
- the list goes on and on…

Anyway, Katie and I will be presenting our project formally tomorrow. We will be video taping it, and I hope to have the video up asap. If you are interested in checking out the project or other System’s 4th year projects. The Systems Design Engineering Design Symposium is Wednesday March 25, 2009 and will be held in the Davis Center at the University of Waterloo. It starts at 10am an is an all day event! 

We presented this project to Waterloo Design Exchange and got some great feedback! The presentation we made is available here (use the arrows in the lower right to navigate the presentation). That presentation can give you a sneak peak of the project but you should really come check out the interactive prototype!

Hope to see you there!