Task exercise - Go to Imaginary Forces

1.
get to the website
press "project"
press "interactive"

2.
press "contact"

Find the incomplete address:
East Coast Commercial Representation
Roxanne Artesona
212.679.9797

Go to Google Maps
Insert the address

Find the location:

Roxanne & Co - more info »

1201 Broadway # 801, New York, NY

(212) 679-9797

The phone number is the same, thus I guess I find the correct and exact address.

If you are trying to build a website, it means that you want to display your information on it. But this website: http://www.imaginaryforces.com/if.html really breaks the law. In this case, we saw that the fancy flash in index take too many seconds to download, and the main menu is not clear. The worst of all is that category of main menu or sub-menu doesn't match people's cognition. And the pop-up windows annoys users. When I use Firefox as my browser, I even couldn't open the video. The last disadvantage is that users couldn't go back to the previous page, which is really inconvenient!!

week4-Gestalt Principles and HCI Design

How do these HCI design principles relate to Gestalt Theory?

I think both of these two theories help designers construct the way people look at everyday things around us. I guess many people have experiences to travel abroad. Sometimes it’s hard to describe or recognize a place you want to go or a simple need you have, like restroom, just like sometimes your own language database couldn’t work for you. But you still can “feel” the exact direction according to icons, signs people’s motions. There is something worldwide. You just know that the tobacco pipe stands for men, and high-heel stands for ladies; or blue for men and pink for women. The environment we grew up taught us lots of things to deal with the world, that’s the conventions, that’s the process of socialization.

Computer network is also a huge society with lots communities. Designers have to try their best to make great communication with their users. Gestalt Theory does great help when we talk about the basic principles of design. I think the principle of Figure & Ground is cool. In this case, the common saying that “To see is to believe” might be not that true. There are some interesting pictures.

Others principles like Similarity, Proximity & Continuity or Closure, Area & Symmetry help people classify what they saw. Also help people organize things efficiently. It’s a dialog between designer and user. People learn how to use from daily design; then designers learn how to design from the usage people might expect. They are both educating each side.

The greatest step of MS Office System is to introduce the concepts of HCI, which makes people easy to understand, and make computer an electronic appliance rather than a professional apparatus.

Further more, in the world of design, the author mentioned about the affordance. It’s an efficient way to communicate with the environment. When you see a button, you know you have to press; when you meet a handle, you will turn it to the opposite size. Especially when you are designing a website, the characteristic of WWW is it displays to worldwide, thus you have to care about the way and thinking process of all mankind.

HCI is a great medium between machines and human, like the old totem of royal families, you could recognize the symbol immediately and find the feedback directly. That’s the shortcut to master the rapid-changing machines we have to face everyday.

week3-Extended Information_Internet Protocols

Internet Protocols

· Building blocks of a network architecture

· Each protocol object has two different interfaces

o service interface: operations on this protocol

o peer-to-peer interface: messages exchanged with peer

· Term “protocol” is overloaded

o specification of peer-to-peer interface

o module that implements this interface

The Design of IPv6

· The Internet could not have been so successful in the past years if IPv4 had contained any major flaw.

· IPv4 was a very good design, and IPv6 should indeed keep most of its characteristics.

· It could have been sufficient to simply increase the size of addresses and to keep everything else unchanged.

· However, 10 years of experience brought lessons.

· IPv6 is built on this additional knowledge. It is not a simple derivation of IPv4, but a definitive improvement.

Resource from: http://www.ee.nthu.edu.tw/english/eindex.html

Assignment 4_Ideal Sites & Aadoption of IM

1. Ideal Website

As a new medium and new platform, the main purpose in website design is to connect yourself or your organization with the public or potential customers. Thus, we should not only make the website looks “cool” but also make the information easy to be searched and understood.

I found some wonderful websites applying in business:

Nike http://www.nike.com/index.jhtml

With international view, they offer many kinds of languages on their homepage which shows their diversity and globalization. Video with flash menu on the first page displays the main event or promotion this season which has a clear focus. The tear-off menu offers a whole-view of the website.

Cartier http://www.cartier.com/

It was also designed with international view. The flash animations of the product, news, background… gives people strong image about their fancy and classical design. The website indeed promotes their industry appearance.

Apple http://www.apple.com/

Apple is well known as their user interface. They keep their influent Macintosh operating system in their website. In order to introduce their new products (iPhone, AppleTV, ) they divide their website with different category. Following the category as TV (Store), phone (iPhone), multimedia player (iPod+iTune), PC (Mac.), media software (QuickTime), peripheral (Support) and operating system (Mac OS X), people could easily find the way according their needs.

I guess website above will be too ideal to me due to too many technical contents it includes. However, there are some websites of fancy design companies which I think might be workable to me:

Mike Davidson and his partner http://www.dmandp.com/

Beginning with influent flash homepage, they have clear concept of layers and classification of their contents. The structure of the website is explicit which offers me the blueprint of my own webpage.

Mike Industries http://www.mikeindustries.com/

Combining the blog and webpage, they offer clear user interface to access a great amount of contents. The most interesting part for me is the Puget Sound view which will update every two minutes. Users could modify the theme, front and size of the webpage as they like, which is also a cool function. The part of portfolio was designed with dynamic images and sententious introduction.

Culture Design http://www.culturedesign.com/

The consistence of the website is also important. They keep the icons of every page arranged in the same way (with the shape of capital c), and the considerate design on the left column makes people easy to get back to the previous page.

2. Instant Messenger

When we talk about the instant messenger communication software, I think we couldn’t say that IM is a seamless communication tool. Because sometimes it’s hard to get a 100 percent quality communication due to the unstable Internet connection or platform server, on the process of communication. We might lose some information during the message transferring! However, there are some amazing progresses applying in IM, such as we could operate several works at the same time, or even one end is not online. We can also enjoy the long-term or short-term communications which are easily switched in text, graphics, and audio media. Off course, the interaction was increased. IM indeed limits the restrictions of time and space.

Connecting to the standardization, I think IM systems really give us a bad example. There are so many different kinds of systems existing in the public, such as MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, NET Messenger Service, Jabber, ICQ and QQ. The compatibility is still a problem among systems, thus if you want to chat with the same friend in different system, you both have to apply a new user account. Also the connecter list couldn’t be duplicated and transferred between different systems.

Applying with the adoption theory, we could discuss about the amount of users. There are several hundred millions people using IM everyday, and the number is gathering higher every year. IM had already experienced the stage of early adopters and increasing in a rapid speed. Maybe in the future, integrating with mobile communication, the power of IM will be much stronger.

Since we live in the world of division of labor, we shouldn’t expect tools with different function have the same performance. Emails also have its weakness. It’s a single-way communication; you couldn’t expect your receiver stay in front of the computer just in order to reply your email immediately. Or sometime you couldn’t even know if your receiver get you mail successfully or not. Thus, I think IM still have great market place in the future.

Assignment 2_Personal Goals & Positions

When it comes to my personal goals of this class, I think I want to learn most about project management. I love to organize activities and events, thus I participated in many organizations in college, for instance, international kite festival, University News, Voice of NCCU, even a baseball tournament. In this class, I want to polish my ability of integration from theory and systematic study. Then I want to learn the basic sense of webpage design. Since the Internet is becoming the most central platform of communication, I want to have the ability of design a complete website, off course, have the ability to analyze the already exist ones.

The third, I would like to learn the programming language (such as XML, HTML, XHTML…) after taking this course. Kathy had mentioned that we have to learn the language by ourselves, thus I think I can kind several useful tool book and online tutorials to practice those abilities. By the way, I also want to use the software of flash and database. It looks that I have to spend lots time in front of my computer.

As to the 2 most wanted positions and 2 less wanted positions, I think I can do well in editor and graphic designer, or maybe marketing executive. I was a director of a newspaper, teaching young journalists how to compose an article and modify their words, thus I think I might do well as an editor. Besides print media, I also learned film making and TV program producing in work. I learned how to use the graphic editing software like Photoshop and video editing software like Premiere. Thus I have essential sense to graphic designing. As to marketing executive, I have experience of participating in PR (Public Relation) team and financial management, thus I can also do well as that job.

What my weaknesses could be working in the position of HTML coder and system administrator/ junior programmer. As I mentioned above, I am not really familiar with the programming language and want to learn some more before I really execute.

Assignment 1_Virtual Team

If I were a project manager of a virtual website design team, I think the most important task for me is to build the intranet social networking. At the beginning, I have to collect all information (including email address, phone number, personal website, IM information…etc.) and employees’ personal profiles from them. In order to assure we have a non-baffle communication channel.

With the medium Internet, I can send e-paper of our company daily to keep updating the policy and operating process of our company. I can also hold web-cam meeting weekly to make sure the project status. Online database is also an important point, which make everyone could update their working process and discuss the problem they face.

As to the identification, first I will hold some activities if possible, because I still believe that face-to-face communication could build people’s relationship in the most efficient way. I think the best way to build the identification is to make people feel they are a “family.” Remembering to mail a birthday will be my little recipe, not to mention in those wonderful holidays. Then offer some welfare to our employees such as gym coupons, movie tickets, or gift cards. Maybe online reading club will be a good way to connect peoples’ relations and minds.

week1-Define The Project

Reading this chapter reminds me a lot of basic knowledge I’d learned about business administration such as production and operation management, marketing management, human resource management, research & development management, finance management and information management. From external to internal factors, a project needs lots of works in order to cover all details.

This book highlights the part of client survey, which is a quite useful tool to know what you client wants before and after they adopt our production. Before we start to design our website, we could know people’s needs and their user behaviors from client survey. And then after they access our website, the survey could focus on the feedback and their experiences.

Then the author moved into the part of understanding your audience. In my college (I majored in journalism), my teachers always told us to find our target audience, after that, you will know your main direction and content.

“The Web is all about the audience.” You need to know what needs, capabilities, wants, and fickle characteristics of your audience. And there is always a point we have to pay attention. As to access the Internet, a certain quality of technical equipments and skills your audiences have to own. Thus, we can narrow down and focus on our target audience.

At the end, Chapter 3 talks about how to create a project plan, which is the exact part I what to learn from this class. After doing all the researches, it’s about the time to startup. The book offers many details of how to do including making the budget, creating a schedule, assigning the team, planning user tests etc..

It’s a good tool book which offers lots detail examples; I think I could learn a lot from the book and other materials in this class.

week1-The Publishing Team & Web Team Roles

These two articles talk about the team itself and team members’ roles when we consider the Web is a certain kind of publishing medium. Like living in the society, everyone has to seek his/her own position. People in a website design team should find his/her own position. From head to bottom, from publisher to HTML coder, only when we operate every single part in the design process can we gather the best layout.

One of my favorite movie【The Butterfly Effect】talks about how every single piece affects the whole world. Indeed, we live in a world of division of professional labor. There is a Chinese saying goes as “You can break off a pair of chopsticks, but there is no way for breaking off ten pairs of chopsticks.” Also an English saying says “United, we stand; divided, we fall.” In the society which admires heroism, I think it’s quite good to learn the spirit of cooperation.

I worked as an editor in a TV news station where a great place for people to learn cooperation is. Media is a refined industry which shows a great division of labor. Because no one is perfect, thus we need experts. The Internet successfully gathers people with different professional specialties. After integrating these special skills, people could have better websites which come from more diversity.

Last part I want to talk about the business model. When the word “design” comes to our minds, we might think about the fine art or sophisticated personality, which sometimes means “art is art, never mention about the money.” But in nowadays, division of labor guarantees designers, engineers and market managers could live good lives and focus only on their strengths. Operate with this way, I think people could have better and better service from Internet surfing.

Back to School~

Ready for the challenge of Winter 2007!