I got my control redesign grade: 88.

It’s a decent grade, though I’m not that concerned about the grade. Since giving my presentation, John’s question, “Who wants gas without flame?” has bubbled to the surface of my brain now and again.

So it wasn’t a surprised when his feedback said the problem with my solution was in the framing of the problem. “Push the boundaries of what is—try to go to the root of the problem by exploring a larger problem.”

That’s the challenge and the excitement of interaction design, I’m learning. Our job is to invent things that don’t exist. Interaction design is different from industrial design and communication design because of the aspect of invention. That is our real value, says JZ.

He reminded us that our projects will become part of our portfolio. He stressed the importance of demonstrating the ability to invent as absolutely critical in getting a job as an interaction designer.

Mobile Project

Our second project is a group project. My group is designing a mobile phone interface to help people find a coffee shop. We chose this of four options. The other three were finding a movie theater, finding tourists venues, and finding a music event.

We are currently conducting user research to help develop personas and frame the problem. It is proving to be rather challenging.

JZ told us to take risks. I’m trying to keep the idea of invention in the back of my mind, and also the recurrent question, “What is the real problem?”

In the next few weeks we will develop wireframes and flow diagrams, and ultimately create a Flash Lite application that we will load onto a mobile phone to see how our idea executes.

In my previous post, I failed to mention the control I redesigned. I choose a knob on my gas stove.

Problems

• Turning the knob to Lite, which is also the highest gas setting, releases more gas than is necessary for pilot light to ignite gas.
• There is no indication of the lowest gas setting. Gas is often turned off attempting to set the flame at its lowest setting. Gas ranges turn off before reaching Off as a safety measure.
• It is difficult to determine the heat setting while cooking. User needs to bend over to see flame to judge current level. There is no indication of low, medium, which are commonly referred to settings in recipes.
• It can be difficult to know that a particular range is on if the flame is low or a pot is on the range.
• The arrow is not an indication of the setting.

Rendered Redesign

Demand the Right Solution

John seemed to like my redesign (hurray!). However, in what I’m learning to be typical John fashion, he asked, “Who wants gas but no flame?”

The answer, of course, is no one (we hope). So the real problem is not where Light is located but rather that there should not be a Light. If the intent of the user is to turn the range on, at any level, there should be a flame. On is on.

He said the redesign is good given the current function of the system, but made a point of saying that we need to make the engineers work for us, and not the other way. We must ask the engineers for the right solution.

I said I didn’t know we could do that for this assignment. “That’s our job,” he said.

You would think with a four-day weekend (I have no classes on Friday), I would have had time to complete my first project without losing sleep. Wrong.

The project was to redesign a singular control for John Zimmeran’s Introduction to Interaction and Visual Interface Design. We had to produce a 11×17 color poster mounted on a 23×17 black board. In addition, we had to provide a CD with the PDF of the poster, and we had to design the CD.

With the best intentions, I set out to complete the project by Sunday, which would leave me all of Monday to do other assignments and perhaps even relax a bit.

While I completed 90 percent of the project Sunday, what having another day available to me meant was that I had a whole other day to rethink everything!

I also underestimated the number of hours I would spend trying to get the CD label to print correctly. Hours. Dumb.

But hell, despite my Labor Day being full of labor, my project is complete. And though I’m not completely happy with the result, it’s complete.

And more importantly, I learned a whole bunch of stuff in the process. Or at the least, I did a bunch of things for the first time, like:

• Tackle an interaction design problem
• Design a 11×17 poster
• Buy black board (though I may have purchased the wrong kind)
• Use an X-Acto knife (another new purchase)
• Use Spray Mount
• Design a CD label
• Print a CD label (many, many times)

I’m sure the project would have went more smoothly had a done a few of those things before. But like I said, doing new stuff is fun, which is why I don’t mind that I won’t get much sleep tonight.

Speaking of which, class is at 8:30 a.m., when I predict a good grilling from the Zimmerman. Going home…