Reading Note : Chapter 1 , The Psychopathology of Everyday Things, from The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

 

Thought : (About Cutting Game)

1. Visibility
   1. Compare to the sample in the article, cutting game has relatively few function, and all the functions are mapping to controls one by one. This will not make user confused.
      
   2. For the tool (button),
      
      1. Scissor, pencil, eraser , hand, and the X(exit) are the most understandable tools
         • But the effect of scissor is not realistic compared to cutting real paper with real scissor.
           
      2. The PageUP (arrow point upside), PageDown (arrow point to downside) buttons are not used by child at first, because they were originally been instructed to use the preview function to view multiple picture simultaneously.
         
         • But in the recent days, I find that they learn to use them by themselves.
           
         • I think it may be result from the simple function the button provide (flip one page, just like what user will do when reading book, instead of showing multiple pages at once)
           
      3. The button for three books and their corresponding preview function is arranged in a structured way, but the picture on the button is not quite easy to understand and some users perceive them with functionality that is not what I intended to express. I need to redesign the symbol I use on the button.
      4. The NewPage, NewBook button : I do not think their symbols are easy to understand, but at the same time I am struggle to decide what symbol I can use to best describe the functionality of them.
         
2. Clue
   • Currently I did not quite understand the difference between the message that visibility convey and the clue
     
   • I think this part is similar to the Visibility (I did not have good example)
     
3. Feedback
   1. When you successfully cut one piece down, the path of cutting will go thicker after you press the button to indicate the completion.
   2. When you take the piece out, the area it occupy originally will become hallow and see the background color (blue)
   3. For all the buttons, it will have green border surrounding the button when you press them.
   4. It have been observed in the user study that simple graphical feedback may not be sufficient to make child understand.
      
      • Sometime they will press a button multiple time, not sure whether they press the button successfully.
        
      • I think it will be good and fun to have some audio feedback when cutting, pressing, moving.
        
      • But we also heard from prof. Lo (and from the observation by ourselves) that these kind of feedback may draw child's attention out of the current activity and unfortunately many autism children has the problem of focus their attention, they are easily been distracted.