Designing Interactive Systems

Redesign and presentation
Assignment 11

• Design principles are found in the stage User interview.

Log of design changes

• After first user interview
• After testing our paper prototype with users
• After testing our Flash prototype with users

How did we apply some of the principles that we learned?

The design process for the Travel Optimizer took place in several stages, which were guided by a varity of differnt guidelines. Thus it is possible to see how the DIA cycle was used and the processes was itterated to get to the final result of this project. When looking at the several steps that were taken in the design process one can see that not only elements from the Gestalt laws were used, but also some of the 9 golden rules of interface design were followed.

The use of gestalt laws for example first become evident in the paper prototype. When deciding how to initially design the layout we tried to keep these in mind. Thus since we knew that experience was one of the points the gestalt laws we looked at the website design of the Deutsche Bahn and other Public Transportation sites and tried to adapt their layout to our system.We believed that the past expierience with these sites would allow users to more easily understand the navigation of our application. In addtion we took great to care to keep elements that were similar in cocepts, such as starting and ending location, also optically similar, which is also a principle of the gestalt laws. In addition we tried to enclose aspects like the entire destination adderess in a sinple box, thus symbolizing that it belongs together. This reflects the aspect of closure. In addition the rest of the gestalt laws were looked at and taken into account were ever possible in the initial paper prototype. In addition to the Gestalt Laws the priciples of the 9 golden rules were taken into account.

Thus one of the motivations of building the application was to keep the interface as simple as possible. For this reason we restricted to possible functionalities to enable a simple use. The simplicity of the user interface was one of the things that was most liked by our test users. In addition we tried to speak the users language, although we were unsure of the actual language use (English or German) it seemed simple to have alternative version that sovled this problem. In general we kept the langauge both simple, short and conciece to enable the user a simple processing of the information supplied by it. To further enable a simple and user freindly use of our application we took great care to encoperate feedback. Thus when the system is processing information, a screen pops up explaining to the user what is happening. This is both one of the golden rules as well as an important aspect of Norman’s principles. Also in respect to the Golden rules we made sure that users could return to the earlier stages of the set up process easily. We added special buttons so that the user could undo their last selection and return to an earlier screen.

The biggest challenges

During the development of the Travel Optimizer, the two most importan challenges that we found were:

• Amount of possible functions to be implement. At the beginning of the project, we had many functions in mind. However, after the paper prototyping many of these fuctions had to be droped out. The difficult part here was to decide with fuctions to take out because all of them were usefull or gave additional features to the system. At the end we took out the functions that would be the less used and that weren't part of the main appplication workflow.
• Decide how to do the prototype. Due to the different opinions of the team members, deciding the layout of the interface was also one of the biggest challenges. After the analysis of already existing interfaces and many hours of discussion, we finally agree on the same design.

Travel Optimizer prototype version 0.3