Reading response 3 Animation—How should we take advantage of it?

There are some important questions you should ask yourself before incorporating animation into the site. Here are a few of them:

• Does the animation add anything of value?
• Does it make the page/site/button easier to use?
• Does it make the purpose or meaning of the page/site/button clearer?
• Is the animation distracting? Does it draw the user's attention away from the page's actual content or the site's core message?

The important thing to remember here is that you are not your website's target audience. Just because you, your employees, or your friends think the animation is cute, funny, or technologically advanced is no guarantee that your site's visitors will think so.

Animation can be a really useful tool. It can make a website more usable, more engaging, and more effective. But like any tool, animation is only helpful when it's needed. You should only use animation when it serves a clear purpose, and even then, you should use it carefully, because too much animation is much worse than not having any at all.

Resource: Animation: Is it good for your website? Retrieve from http://www.inspire-consulting.com/resources/article.aspx?id=10

Regarding the application of animation, it seems that I have never thought carefully about these rules and relevant gentle reminders until I have the chance to review our course wiki of animation for assignment. I am always a visual person. I love animation since I was kid. Even now, if I have to make one choice, I prefer a website with the combination of texts and visual images (including animation) to the one that just full of texts without decoration---even those visual images are just for decoration purpose.

I agree that well-applied animation can improve learning skills and abilities, whereas, constantly running animations can be distracting when used excessively. In most cases, the appropriate application, in my opinion, helps us understand the content faster and more easily, while, ill-applied animation sometimes challenges our patience and makes us weary. Its application has more implications than we expected, such as the consideration of the contexts—formal or informal situations, the target users—age and gender, the purposes—for acquisition or for entertainment/ fun, the content demonstrated---academic or practical, so on and so forth.

Let’s imagine two different scenarios. Mrs. Little is now teaching her grade one students basic daily disciplines—say, how to be a polite kid when borrowing and returning other’s pencils or what is the proper behavior when playing games with other kids, etc. She prepared a relevant PPT or created a website by applying cute and funny animations that well demonstrate the proper behaviors that a polite kid should follow.

The other scenario is Dr. Vaughan is now providing a serial seminar for his PhD students. The topic is related to the bottom line of human’s morals. And, the discussion outcomes have to be recorded and prepared for a paper to be issued. Should Dr. Vaughan prepare the stuffs for the seminar with animations as Mrs. Little does in her elementary class? Obviously, not at all.  

Animation is really a fascinating tool for Kids. Kids will benefit a lot and have better learning outcomes from animations. In the first scenario, kids may be illiterate, but they are impressed by the colorful animations at the first glance, then gradually go to where the instructor desires for them.  However, if the potential users of a website/ PPT/ product are adults, along with tons of information delivered in a formal situation, animation is not a good choice unless it is helpful for the content clarification, or, even it is helpful, it should not be overused. Otherwise, it must be ignored at all. Therefore, animation is meaningless in the second scenario. Furthermore, I think males will be disgust animation more than females do in formal situations for academic purposes, as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.”; males are usually more sensible than Females. In a word, “Whether or not you should use animation depends on the purpose of the animation. Or rather, it depends on whether the animation has a purpose. ”

Reading response 2-- High usability

“In the ideal process, you'd first conduct competitive testing to get deep insights into user needs and behaviors with the class of functionality you're designing. Next, you'd proceed to parallel design to explore a wide range of solutions to this design problem. Finally, you'd go through many rounds of iterative design to polish your chosen solution to a high level of user experience quality."

                                                                                           -----Jakob Nielsen

I could not tell myself that how systematical and how well Nielsen summarized the design process for us as a golden guiding rule.  Back to our group project—Feed Me Well, I could not count how many times our group revised the project, although it is just a class assignment without any marketing purposes.  From brainstorming to the initial prototype, we did tons of research on why it is meaningful to the end users, how much possible it is to execute and implement the design, what kind of interfaces would meet the end users’ expectation, etc. In each phase, nearly every week, we group members usually sat together and spent at least half an hour to polish every version of the draft. Moreover, after three times of peer reviews and user testing, we refined the design ideas based on their feedbacks. I think this typical iterative design results in a positive effect and an approval from the peers, at least until now. “More iterations are better.” In the following production and evaluation phases, our group will follow the rules and keep applying them to our design, from which I am sure you could see big improvements.

“At each step, you should be sure to judge the designs based on empirical observations of real user behavior instead of your own preferences. (Repeat after me: "I am not the Audience.")

                                                                                                     ---Jakob Nielsen

Coincidently, yesterday, one of my friends talked to me about a project that she is currently responsible for. She, a curriculum developer, got a big lesson from her director. Her director, who leads the project’s development direction, did not start it based on the customers’ needs but just based on her own assumptions instead. Until in a conference meeting with the customers, they got many feedbacks from their customers, they suddenly found out that the project they designed did not meet their customers’ needs, and the customers actually did not need the project which the whole project group has been struggling for in the past half a year.  In other words, the project has never been on the right track since the very beginning due to the director’s assumption. “As a designer, we could not underestimate or overestimate customers based on our own assumption.” Concluded she, and deeply sighed.  The lesson my friend got from her director once again emphasized the importance of the user-based design, which is similar to Nielsen’s reminder that “I am not the audience”, and could not replace the audience to decide how it will be designed just depending on our own assumption.  As such, thanks to the user-based design course, I have an opportunity to deepen my understanding on it and to do more practices.

Just for fun. Below is the video about Google logo, from which you might get some inspirations in your following design phases:-)

Reading Response 1—Cautious cars and cantankerous kitchens

“Our lives are transformed both for good and for bad. This is good when the devices work as promised—and bad when they fail or when they transform productive, creative people into servants continually looking after their machines, getting them out of trouble , repairing them, and maintaining them (P16). ”

“In many cases, they (machines) will make our lives more effective, more fun, and safer. In others, however, they will frustrate us, get in our way, and even increase dangers (p34).”

Most probably, not only Norman has these concerns, but experts, even ordinary people who are interest in the relationship between human beings and technology, could not help considering the issues aroused by technology. The contradiction is just like a coin has two sides.

Once again, it reminds me of the movie Wall-E. I want to insert my critical ideas into it, which would make it more vivid and understandable. Apart from the theme of affirmative character from Wall-E, the movie also reflects a critical issue on the relationship between humans and technology. You might still remember that in the movie, all of the humans, who evacuated Earth 700 years earlier, lived in a large space cruise ship, which was far away from the earth. In the ship, everything is high-tech driven. Machines and robots with various functions are around everywhere. Humans do not need to do things, as hi-tech replaces humans to do them successfully. The people of Earth only ride around this space resort on hovering chairs which give them a constant feed of TV and video chatting. They drink all of their meals through a straw out of laziness and bone loss. Thoroughly depending on the hovering chairs, both adults and kids are so fat that they can barely move and do not know how to walk any longer. I have to admit that the labors are really free due to hi-tech. With these hi-tech, humans are indeed served very well. However, it seems the legs with humans are redundant, face-to-face communication is useless; furthermore, it seems humans cannot live without technology and the world is disordered if something is wrong with a tiny machine part. By watching this scene, I began to doubt if it is the dream world that humans have been struggling for in the hundreds of years.                 

More ironically, the auto-pilot computer in the captain’s office, which was designed to be controlled by the captain of the ship, prevents the people from returning and fights with the captain when the captain tries to command it to return back to the earth. Although there is still a good ending in the movie that people finally return back to the earth, I cannot stop thinking that how we should develop the advance tools that serve us very well, and to what extent we should develop them. Otherwise, they become the obstacles that all of us are not willing to accept it, just as Norman mentioned that “They (machines) will frustrate us, get in our way, and even increase dangers (P34).”

Do the machines or robots make humans redundant? No! It is the humans not the machines or robots who make themselves redundant. When I ponder much further, I realize that this movie actually doesn't demonize technology. It only argues that technology should be properly used to help humans cultivate their true nature – that it must be subordinate to human flourishing, and help move that along.

Likewise, I don’t want to demonize technology. On the contrary, I am looking forward to the smooth interaction between people and those intelligent devices. And, the key to achieve it is, I think Norman has already given us the answer, “we must design our technologies for the way people actually behave, not the way we would like them to behave (p12).” Hopefully, a graceful symbiosis of people and technology will become highly true in 700 years, which the movie Wall-E has shown to us---humans and robots are working alongside each other to renew the Earth during the end credits.