Reading Note - Designing for Usability: Key Principles and What Designers Think by John D. Gould and Clayton Lewis

 

Thought :

For Cutting Game, the project I am working on.

1. Early Focus on Users and Tasks
   • I will say that we did or we didn't.
     
   • Did
     • Our user is clearly stated at the beginning of the project : child with autism.
       
     • The idea is raised by Prof. Lo from OT who was an expert on autism child therapy.
       
     • The environment for the task (cutting game) is firmed : Playing the game at home.
   • Didn't
     • We did not have direct contact with child, at least we did not have chance to get children's trust and talk to them.
     • Even we have the chance, it is still need a lot of effort and training to be able to
       
       • interact with autism child carefully and properly.
         
       • speak in a way that they can understand
       • understand what they say
         • At least this one is very difficult, as I  attend the user study for so long.
         • It will need you to understand in details what problem this child has (from the medical aspect), why the child react or behave like that (behavioral science, psychology, ...).
           
         • All of these are far beyond my understanding, it need time for one to learn the knowledge (from occupational therapy), observe the child for a period, and get experience through practicing, which is impossible for a student from CS along(not even the chance and qualification, unless our school have program to support this kind of interdisciplinary research more actively, instead of just giving budget and saying that something like "We definitely encourage interdisciplinary research")
           
2. Empirical Measurement
   1. The problem we met is like the "Didn't" part in the first principle, we reply on prof. Lo's specialism.
   2. The problem is a special one that common project focus on usual people may not encounter, our target user (autism child) is not so accessible.
   3. On the other hand, under such condition, I need to think more about learnability and usability of the cutting game by myself, find method to evaluate how easy to know everything need to play the game and thus be able to improve them.
      
3. Iterative Design

• It is clear that we are working in this style, besides that we rely on prof. Lo's specialism to represent the target user at first.
• On the other hand, we don't have skill and chance to communicate with autism child, so rely on domain expert may be a reasonable and effective way.
• Though the study, we indeed revise the cutting game according to our observation and feedback from child and their parents.