FLOW & WIREFRAMES (multiple projects)
This is a collection of flow charts and wireframes for various projects and clients using Omnigraffle and InDesign.
HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO? (museum)
AGENCY: WEATHERHEAD Design
TEAM: IA/UX Producer/Writer: Char Easter; Creative Director: Andrea Weatherhead; Writers: Katrinka Mannelly and Rachel DeBusk; Design: Rachel Dory/Henry Pann; TPM: Bob Freeman
ABOUT THE PROJECT: How Far Would You Go? (HFWYG) asks visitors to reflect on how far they would go to support a civic issue using a walking metaphor (door-to-door or marching for your cause). The visitor walks on a footpad to navigate down illustrated streets that appear onscreen. Each street represents a civic issue or action from the Central Puget Sound during the ‘60s and ‘70s and today.
CHALLENGE 1: How do you help a user navigate a sign post with six menu options and input a choice with their feet? Add the electromechanical challenge of a footpad that senses the visitor’s weight and re-calibrates to read an 8-year old girl to a grown man or, not as per design, an entire group of tourists at once.
CHALLENGE 2: How do you communicate to the visitor this unusual mode of navigation?
APPROACH 1: To help visitors understand our signpost menu, the options auto-cycled, “To choose an issue, touch or stomp when highlighted.” We added contextual VO cues, prompts, and on-screen text built into the street environment. To be sure, we added a touch option. And if all else fails, and it will in a museum where visitors are distracted with short attention spans, you can, “Let your fingers do the walking,” a feature that complied to wheelchair accessibility.
APPROACH 2: In the first iteration, both tasks were on one page. To clarify, we separated the screens, removing all info except how to “Choose Your Shoes” and on the next screen the directive to, “Start Walking.” The rule was, one direction per page.
NO WIREFRAMES? OH MY!
As a former producer who’s been through the product/project life-cycle end-to-end many times, I love this infographic by the User Professionals’ Assoc. that tells the story from an ideal UCD perspective. In the real world, however, we go way off road from this tidy, step-by-step game path in order to meet tight timelines and budgets and [...]
IA/UX MEETUP: Significance, Search & IA
UX in the Wild -February 12 2013 Significance, Search & Information Architecture Piecora’s Pizza in Capitol Hill, Seattle WA This month’s Seattle AI/UX Meet UP group featured Ruth Burr of SEOMoz and Ian Lurie of Portent who spoke about the relationship of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Information Architecture and User Experience. So much of [...]
FRED: Feedback/Review Electronic Database (software)
AGENCY: Toolhouse Design
MY ROLE: IA/UX Designer/Lead
CHALLENGE: The high volume of work from our top clients made it difficult to track the design reviews by email. One of the problems was that within the client’s organization, a manager from one department was not aware of the other managers’ comments. We also needed the solution to work for more than one client.
APPROACH: To help manage the complexity of interactions for both our team and the client our approach was to add cohesiveness and transparency for the various stakeholders. We focused on features that allowed searching, viewing and commenting on a given review.
SOLUTION: We created a custom, online tool: a Feedback and Review Electronic Database – or more fondly referred to as FRED. Some of FRED’s features included: search and sort by date, title or author; view all comments including previous iterations; make and submit comments; upload media; and more.
DOVE – Dove Oscars® Video Creation Tool (web)
IA/UX Design/Editorial Lead
MSN Branded Entertainment Experience Team, Redmond/London
CHALLENGE: Dove needed a site that allowed women to enter a video contest on the topic of why they love Dove. The winning video/ad aired during a commercial break at the Oscars®. The UI needed to be easy to use so that a non-technical audience could complete fairly technical tasks: assembling their own movie using assets from the site or uploading a movie they created. The process involved a Windows Live login that not only interrupted the user flow, but was complicated if they did not have an existing login. There was also a rigorous review process involving multi-tiered stakeholders including the Oscars review team. We had a tight and non-negotiable deadline, dictated by the Oscars event.
APPROACH: Working across Seattle, NYC, and London teams, I served as IA and UX designer in my role as the editorial lead. I collaborated on-site with the UK visual design and dev teams to clarify and streamline the UI, looking in detail at user assistance, site structure and flow, text labels, and layout.
SOLUTION: One revision was to change the “1, 2, 3 Steps” to a “Two Options” message to clarify to the user they had two options to submit a video.
ADS + PERSONALITY TYPES (user study)
Usability Testing/Analysis
Graduate project, UW
Team: Char Easter, Travis Martin, and Donna Thelander
CHALLENGE: Our team was asked the question: Does your personality predict what online advertisements you find compelling? H0: All personality types like all types of advertisements. There is no difference. H1: Some personality types will like or dislike specific advertisements.
APPROACH: For the independent variables, we used 5 personality types based on “the Big 5″ model. The two dependent variables were: 1) Interest in the product and; 2) Interest in the design of the advertisement. We gathered a sampling of ads and made our best guess to match the ads to the personality types for our test. We used SPSS software to calculate the statistics.
SOLUTION: 8 significant correlations; 7 significant linear regressions, p < .01
HOMESCHOOL BLIKI (graduate usability study)
Usability Field Study
Graduate project, UW
Team: Paulette DeGard, Char Easter, Anya Luke-Killam, Todd Mackey
CHALLENGE: Define a community of users with a communication need; do the fieldwork research; and design a prototype of an online system that solves the communication problem you have identified.
APPROACH: We chose homeschoolers with a focus on knowledge building through collaboration and sharing resources for a broad range of homeschooling participants. Method: For the brainstorming phase, we used an Affinity Diagram (not shown) to help us determine the type of site that would best serve this community.
SOLUTION: We generated the idea of a Bliki – a blog and wiki hybrid.
SUPER-HERO TEAM SHARE THE LOVE (podcast)
UX in the Wild – Sept. 25, 2012 This is from a podcast on UIE with Stephanie Sullivan Rewis and Greg Rewis titled, “What Designers Need to Know About HTML5 and CSS3.” The interview focuses on what designers should be aware of when handing off files to a front-end developer. I found the tips relevant to UX [...]
V-BRAILLE (accessibility app)
UX in the Wild - Aug. 29, 2012: Seattle WA Today I met with Richard Ladner, Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. The interview was regarding a project he is leading – a touch screen game for blind children to learn braille. The product is called, V-Braille. V-Braille is touch screen game [...]
WHY UX IN THE WILD?
UX is architectural. It extends beyond the boundaries of a monitor into the environment. It is design for the human in their space, from smart homes to smart phones, from road signs to buying a car. Karen Holtzblatt, the CEO of InContext Design writes in her blog posting on CHI 2012, “I believe that the next real [...]
SITE X (usability report)
Usability Report
Graduate project, UW
Team: Lisa Tiedt and Char Easter
CHALLENGE: Design and conduct a benchmark exploratory usability test for a design agency.
APPROACH: We focused our study to uncover user concerns, problems, and mistaken assumptions with respect to navigation and terminology. We also tested the content and how it would influence a potential client’s impression of the target agency. We defined our measures and tested using a Likert scale to calculate a rating. An eye-tracking software test was incorporated into the data gathering.
SOLUTION: Our 25-page report included methods, key findings and recommendations for the client. We also included our reviews of comparable sites for context and best practices.
MOBILE-MEDIATED INTERRUPTION MGT (poster)
Submitted by: Char Easter, Lindsey Latiolais, Shane McDowell, Silke Wesselink. 596 Research, Professor Judy Ramey, 2010 Title: Mobile-Mediated Interruption Management Poster Design: Char Easter Cognitive effects of being interrupted While companies churn out smarter phones, more mobile apps, faster web access, and sticky networking systems to satiate the desire to stay in constant contact and engaged, is [...]
FUTURE OF FASHION (poster)
Submitted by: Char Easter, HCDE Master Graduate, June 2011 Oct 27, 2011 Title: The Future of Fashion Abstract: What is that electronic engineer doing in the fashion world? This poster highlights whats trending in wearable computing. The hyper efficient, water collection suit used in the sci-fi fantasy book Dune is not so far off in the [...]
MOBILE USER TESTING
UX in the Wild – July 18, 2012: Aquent, Seattle WA Mobile Usability Testing presentation I attended a IXDA (Interaction Design Association) sponsored talk on “Mobile Usability Testing,” presented by Interact Seattle. Tom Pease from Analytic Design Group spoke about how mobile usability testing is all about context. He began with three statistics* on mobile [...]
YOGA FOR MENOPAUSE (interactive video)
UX Designer/Producer
Run Chica/Felicity Green
CHALLENGE: The growing population of baby boomers means more women are in some stage of menopause and many are looking for alternative methods to control their symptoms. As media consumers, this was a lo-tech audience (2004). Our subject matter expert did not condone the audience doing the poses while watching the video.
APPROACH: I approached Felicity Green, a renowned Iyengar yoga instructor, to design a practice. We also wanted sharing stories to be part of the presentation. Based on a survey sent to a sampling of yoga practitioners, we chose a DVD format.
SOLUTION: Yoga for Menopause (YfM) DVD features 9 poses using a different student for each. A round table discussion gave the audience stories by women that they could relate with. We also had a section with alternative health resources.
INTERVIEW ON BACKSTAGE BUSINESS
Aug. 17, 2011 John Lucchetti, Founder of BackstageBiz.com, asked me to talk his audience of up and coming artists about my experiences as an interactive media professional. John’s inspiration for Backstage Business is to mentor young artists from a range of disciplines (filmmakers, graphic design, sound design, musicians, 3D animators, etc.) on how to navigate [...]
