08.30.07
A week has passed….
wow… i haven’t blogged for ages! Like a whole entire week… oops…. So what has happened since then?
Well we did our concept presentations on Friday – probably explains why there has been no blog cos who wasn’t absolutely buggered by the end of it? So that’s done…
And since then I’ve pretty much been working on coming to terms with webpage development – html and css and stuff – and i have created something that looks better than what it was previously – that tute exercise where it said “welcome to my homepage. here’s a link to my blog”.
today’s lecture was on evaluation techniques and one of the techniques was to get users to use the product and either “think aloud” or explain in retrospect why they did what they did, or to get users to keep a diary of using that product. Now since we’re not going to be developing a working product, that’s a bit hard. so an alternative was to get users to use a current product and comment on that… well, my whole point is that that wouldn’t work for me either cos the one RealFlight flight simulator we have costs $299 and there’s no way i could borrow it even if we had it in stock :P so yeah… i gotta figure out some questionnaire questions….
i think people all knew me in high school as the design person who kept circulating questionnaires for each of my projects… it was kinda cool… i loved making questionnaires…. not necessarily analysing the results though…
oh! did you know that a lot of DS games still don’t really utilise the touch screen as much as they should? i mean final fantasy 3 and other RPGs use it to make battles easier – you just jab the guy you wanna attack – but a lot of games like mario kart and yoshi’s island and stuff still mainly use the buttons…. although mario kart has this function in ‘balloon battle’ where you blow into the microphone to inflate your balloon – that’s pretty cool…. also pretty irrelevant though…. blowing on it is not gonna help if your RC car is overheating :P
08.23.07
user requirements
i’ve done my presentation slides for tomorrow…
basically no new developments in terms of the idea – that’s where the research for the user requirements comes in.
So i will be researching about user requirements by: talking to my market – i’ve already got a couple of people in mind from this market; becoming a user myself – cos i didn’t spend $130 on a heli for it to gather dust; and some research into existing products…
Some of the stuff i will need to find out about user requirements include:
- The importance of the physical sticks of the radio in controlling the aircraft proportionally
- Whether or not it is too difficult for new RC users to get a hang of the controls (particularly 4- or 6-channels) and whether it can be made easier if it is. If it is not too difficult, in what ways could user experience be further enhanced?
- Whether or not using the screen would be a good idea
- The good and bad features of current flight sims – could leave me room to improve upon them…
- For what purpose would the users be using the product – so whether they will be using it to replace the need to buy an aircraft model, whether they want to use it as practice before they actually fly, or whether they will be playing it as a totally independent game. This is probably the most important question – i need to know how realistic or how different or however else the users want the product so that i can design it to suit their purpose. Not sure i explained it that well.. but its important ok? ;)
That’s about it for now…
08.19.07
Flight Sim Vids
Ok… what did we do on Friday…? Lecture was on prototyping… low-fidelity p/typing where it doesn’t have to resemble or function like the final product, only the most essential features…. high-fidelity p/types look very much like the end product but may no have all the functions of the end product… apparently that is what our final project’s meant to be…
Anyways, I went to the RealFlight site – they’re the brand of RC flight sim we sell… and I looked at the gallery there (take a look… the heli videos, very very cool…) and there were some interesting images and videos of the flight sim being used. I went there to see what sorts of features are in a flight simulator game and I found that for some environments they use real photo scenery with a CG aircraft, and in others the whole environment is CG. They also have a multi-cam feature showing… well, multiple camera views… there’s a split-screen feature so you could fly with a friend… and in terms of the game itself, there are a number of different events you could fly in…
So that’s all I’ve found out really… enough to get me thinking about the features I might put into mine… I’m thinking along the “wearable computing” line… so the glasses idea sounds good… seeing as they have VR glasses… so I mine will probably differ cos it will have the wireless connection to the iphone as the control. Also i think that the accelerometers that detect change in orientation will definitely have to be used to make the controls more intuitive than using stick controls… that’s about it really… keep you posted :)
08.16.07
push the envelope?
Well i have my user group: hobbyists, RC enthusiasts… so it’s easy enough…
And now i kinda have a better idea of what i need to be researching. Cos i’ve always been told to “push the envelope” a bit when it comes to my designs… and after discussing the idea with Rob, my flight simulator idea is apparently kinda playing it safe a bit. Which is ok, cos i got the idea from an existing one – cos we do have flight simulators where you use the radio and fly a virtual aircraft.
So in order to improve the idea i would need to think about how i would perhaps create a different user experience for these RC enthusiasts who would probably not have any trouble using radio control…
One possibility, which i had had a passing thought about but didn’t blog (yes i know, i should have and it undermines the purpose of the blog as documentation if i don’t record any such ideas… but anyways) is to use the iphone as the actual controller…. so it may not necessarily be radio control… cos it radio has some limitations…. i think the reason i disregarded it at first was because i was thinking more of using it to control the physical aircraft, which would have been… not so much hard, but not practical, there isn’t much of a need for it, and if that was the case then it would send radio control manufacturers out of business… we don’t really wanna do that :P
I still think that the touch-screen, accelerometers and proximity detectors would be very useful in perhaps redesigning the radio interface, making it easier to use for people whose hand-eye coordination or perception may not be so great? my perception is crap by the way, which is why i can’t drive RC around a track… not well anyway… so that should be ok to work on…. although i need to talk to people who are better at using RC than me first to get their opinion on how i could redesign it…
And more of Rob’s suggestions were to investigate using wi-fi to control rather than radio, using the camera as an on-board camera (i like this idea by the way… my brother, big fan of those on-board shots!) and also something similar to those 3D glasses which let you see what you are flying as is rather than on the screen…. it would be good to have the glasses, so you see what you are doing when you look up… and have the on-board view from the camera when you look down…. interesting interesting…. oh! how about live video recording so that you can review on-board video footage of each flight? A good thing about not using the screen to fly is that it overcomes the issue of screen size limitations so that the screen can be used only for the design of the controller interface… that’s good… one constraint down…
Yep, i’m getting more g’ed about this idea…. :)
08.14.07
RC Helis…
One more thing for today… if you’re interested, Patrick I know you are (we don’t have any in stock and won’t be getting any until at least after August :P), take a look at the Venom site – they make RC stuff like cars, accessories and helicopters and have downloadable manuals and stuff… I can’t view it cos I need to install the necessary plug-ins… tsk tsk, overburdening the user….
Oh wait, I lied. Not one more thing… another is that for my design, I have ruled out using a pistol-grip radio due to the limitation of the screen size of the iphone… not just the iphone, wireless devices in general. Cos if i were to use it, i need to include a trigger and a wheel… which doesn’t work in 2D as it is… unless you use the accelerometers so that it reacts to change in orientation… but it’s not very practical cos then your screen tilts and you can’t see where you’re going… Stick-type is definitely the way to go. Cos its simple, one stick on each end of the screen with the space in between as the environment in which you are flying/driving the thing… but i still haven’t decided on flight or driving simulator…. driving is simpler, but you can do more with flight… ah well, get back to you soon… maybe…
Research: Interaction & User Experience
My brother bought me a design book in the semester break… it was from Basement Books near Central Station so it was really cheap… like really cheap…. and I had a look through it. It was called Convergence Design and guess what it was about? It was all about “Creating the user experience for interactive television, wireless and broadband”… wow… sounds perfect for a certain subject called Interaction Design Studio, eh? It was basically a collection of projects to do with interactive design… here’s some interesting stuff I found:
- As we were told, the designer’s role in interaction design is to reduce the complexity of concepts into simple elements. This is done by making a good user interface, so that it can appeal to the intended market and well, be marketable…
- A successful project involves the designer developing a scenario for one medium, but also allows the scenario to be repurposed so that it can be experienced across different platforms… I take this to mean pretty much what we are doing – we’re developing a web application that can be experienced via the iphone, which ideally would enhance the user’s experience of the product.
- I skimmed the bit about interactive TV. An example they provided was for CSI. Basically when watching the show, a side panel appears to do a variety of stuff, such as explain crime and medical jargon used, give tech specs of weapons, profiles of main characters and also to hold live polls for the prediction of results so viewers feel involved.
- Apparently according to a report, wireless gaming is seen as “the single biggest factor driving the adoption of 3G mobile devices”. Which is good. Cos it justifies my development of a game for the iphone – wireless device :P
- Although I did read about another interesting concept. Apparently agency.com developed a travel-planning, itinerary sort of application for PDAs or phones, where it has a map which allows you to zoom in on a particular spot, find information about where you are, and also search for restaurants, accommodation, sight-seeing spots etc based on criteria such as food type, price range etc… it has shop descriptions, opening hours and stuff like that…. that was pretty cool… doesn’t really help with my project, but its interesting…
That’s about all i got from the book… it was printed in 2003, but the information in it already seems a bit dated… how far technology has come ;)
Stuff about Lectures #2
This is what happens when I don’t blog for a while… I have too much I need to say…. but hey, it’s better than having nothing to say…
Anyways, Thursday/Friday’s lecture was about expressive interfaces, interface agents and some really BAD examples that cause user frustration (i.e. MS Word’s Clippit) and I’m pretty sure the one thing that everyone remembers from that lecture is the video of the guy who apparently “Looks like you’re typing a letter…” yeah…. that was cool…
Oh! just reviewing the lecture notes then, I was reminded of a case of a particular site being “under construction”. It was the website for an Asian hobby store and they were setting up a ’shopping mall’ section to their site, where we supposed we could browse all their items and buy stuff online… well, we (that’s me and my brother) went to that site maybe three times over several weeks… then I gave up… my brother insisted to continue checking for a while longer then gave up too…. but we went back there maybe a year later, and it was STILL under construction… very frustrating… ah well…
Hmm… there was also a lecture somewhere about human interactions and the rules of conversation… That one was kinda interesting… but thanks to that, now everyone’s conscious of their conversation conduct “Oh! I broke the rules of conversation!” :P Ah well, at least the message got through….
um… what else was in the lectures…. ah! emoticons help in creating expressive user interfaces…. two of my personal favourites :P and -___-”
i think that’s about it for the lectures… i’m sure i’ve missed stuff… but ah well…
Stuff about Lectures
I keep forgetting that we’re supposed to blog about stuff we learn in lectures as well as documenting the project! Not used to blogging everyday on anything sort of thing… folios were for project purposes, anything unrelated was not put in, anything that was put in had to be justified as to why it was put in… not so with blog…
So, from the first lecture we had, the one point that stuck in my mind was the need to for the controls of the application to be recognisable more than memorable. Cos people hate to memorise how to use something, they want to look at the button or whatever and for it to be able to kind of give them some idea of what it does (yeah MAYA! memorising all those hotkeys! and the icons are pretty sucky too… i still can’t figure it out! Look at Rhino for good user interface! Simple, unambiguous…) but anyways, yeah… since I’m thinking of flight/driving simulator sort of thing, and my market mainly consist of hobbyists to whom the basic controls of a radio should be pretty second-nature, there shouldn’t be much of a problem with memorising/recognising the controls.
Oh! just had a thought! The stick-type controls for (see below) for helicopters have a bit of a problem: the controls are reversed for some countries… so in Australia, the right stick is throttle… its the left for the US (we’ve had numerous complaints at work from angry customers who don’t read their instructions…). Oh, for cars too… throttle is left. Easily fixed though… just have make it part of the options to have the controls reversible…
08.09.07
i gotta fly my heli
As part of my “research” (eheheh…) I will eventually get a video for you all of flying my RC helicopter… when I get the time… maybe over the weekend? Haven’t used it for ages… that’d be cool…
But I can’t believe I forgot to look at it on Monday! We have a flight simulator sitting in our window at work… and I was bored outta my mind on from 10-7, but yet I still forgot to pull it out and have a look at its features (research!) sigh…. I will remember this week though… and if not, I’ll probably just google it… trusty google…. but anyways, I haven’t really done much more… gotta get this 15 page report thing for 1005 out of the way first….
08.05.07
productivity died…
well tried to do something…. i really did…. but it’s hard enough going to work with a cold and cos even in full health you come back feeling buggered anyway… and then to try and do some uni work…. it’s really hard… but you reckon i’ve blogged enough over the weekend? i mean, it’s not all meaningless ranting… ;)
