Week 10: Physical Design

Hi, this week we learned about physical design, getting concrete.

Design, is about making choices and decision. To balance it, we need :

Environmental, user, data, usability requirement 
and
Functional requirement. 

- Physical interface of interactive product should not conflict with the user's cognitive processes involved in achieving the task.

Guidelines to help with international design : 
- Be careful about using images that depict hand gestures of people.
- Use generic icon ( common icon )
- Choose colour that are not associated with national flags or political movements
- make sure the product supports different calenders, date formats and time formats
- Make sure the product support different number formats, currencies, weights and measurement systems.
- The product supports international paper size, envelope size and address format
- Not to integrating text in graphics as they cannot be translated easily
- Allow for text expansion when translated from English

Using scenarios in design 
- scenarios can be sued to explicate existing work situation but use more for expressing proposed or imagines situations to help in conceptual design


- 4 roles for scenarios :
> basis for the overall design
> technical implementation
> means of cooperation within design teams
> means of cooperation across professional boundaries eg. in a multidisciplinary team

- Used for the notion of plus and minus scenarios
> capture the most positive and the most negative consequences of a particular proposed design solution
> helping designers to gain a more comprehensive view of the proposal

Generating storyboards from scenarios
- storyboard > a sequence of actions/ events that the user and system go through to achieve a task
- scenario > one story about how the product may be used to achieve a task

Thank you.