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This week was not as intense as the past couple weeks, which was a nice change. Part of that had to do with us not starting to actually create our change of address forms until Thursday.

Despite only having one day to turn it around, everyone turned in quality work. It was impressive to see all the variations. They all looked professional.

Like I said, I pretty much kept to my thumbnail sketch (which Bob collected—ugh!). I went with a simplified approach that separated the form process into four steps. I eliminated nearly all the directions and instead aimed to make everything clear through the form itself and instructive headers.

My Form

Bob didn’t say much about mine during the critique. It seems that critiques (or crits) are a crapshoot when it comes whether your piece receives much evaluation. Some of us talked about this after class. We mused about the time and energy that goes into a project with the potential that it won’t really be reviewed, and how that can be a bit of a letdown.

Hard to believe there are only two more weeks to go. Next week we explore photography. And the last week is illustration, I believe.

Today Bob critiqued our thumbnail sketches. Mine were pretty bad in retrospect. Bad in the sense that they didn’t look like much time or thought went into them, which is true for the time part. However, as it turns out, I followed my thumbnail sketch for my final production.

Mine were full scale: 10.5 x 6.125. I wanted to see the space I was working with, and get a sense of the organization of the content in that space. I only added a few design details. And I used a pen.

So it wasn’t a big surprise to me that Bob did not spend much time critiquing my thumbnails.

I believe in the idea of sketching out ideas. I was always an advocate for wireframes for web design if time and budget allowed. But I don’t know that there has to be a specific format or look for thumbnail sketches to be useful.

For this project, I felt confident moving forward with the sketches I created. What I’m getting at is I think that part of the process of creating a design is whatever works for you. Thumbnail sketches and wireframes can be very useful, and I believe that complex designs should be sketched and explored before taking them to the computer. But I’m not sure there’s a rule to follow.

Like I said, my sketches helped me and provided direction for my final product. So in effect, they did the job, despite looking like I did not put a lot of time into them.

Yesterday my group and I wandered about CMU campus looking for people to fill out the US Postal Service’s mail forwarding change of address form so we could see what types of problems people have. The idea was to use the information we gathered to inform the redesign of the form that each of us will be completing by Friday.

We ended up testing five people. While that may seem like a small number, it’s amazing what you can determine from even the smallest amount of user testing.

Today in class, the three groups compared findings. The two major issues that everyone encountered were:

• No one read or even knew there were directions, since they’re not attached to the form
• Most people did not know how to mail the form when they were done.

People did not have much trouble with the form itself, as it’s pretty simple. But the design could definitely be improved to make it friendlier, at the least.

The forms we are creating will be 10.5 inches x 6.125 inches (the current form is 7 inches x 5.5 inches). So we’ll have room to bring in any needed directions as part of the form.

For tomorrow we are to create thumbnail sketches of proposed designs. I’ve already done mine, one as a vertical layout, and the other horizontal. They include numbered sections to help people easily figure out what they need to fill out and where to go next. At least, that is the intention.

This week we’re exploring information design with Bob Swinehart. Today we talked broadly about information design, and defined it as designing to help people understand information. And while that makes sense, it also has the feel of defining interaction design as “designing for interaction.” Though I do like the simplicity of both.

Our project for this week is to redesign the U.S. Post Service mail-in change of address form. This is a project that Bob has actually already undertaken. Our effort is purely educational.

We were put in groups of four or five. And tomorrow each group will find subjects on the street for user testing of the current form so that we can discover common flaws. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?