Reading Seminar 2 - Fredrik Berglund

Brainstorming: I think there are some really good examples of brainstorming techniques covered in chapter 6. If we had planned more before our brainstorming sessions and maybe used one of the examples in the book like Brainwriting or Questioning we could have gotten more ideas in the same amount of time.


Design principles: This is definitely something I think we should do to make sure the team is working towards the same goal and make sure we are designing something different enough from competitors.


Affordances: A great concept about how the properties of a product provides an indication of how to interact with it; just how a product looks, it's weight, texture etc. indicates what to do with it.

"The size, shape, and even weight of mobile devices let us know that they should be carried with us. [...] The empty space in a cup is an affordance that tells us we could fill the cup with liquid."

Cool stuff.


Feedback is really important in all products and we have to make sure the user gets appropriate feedback for all their actions. Feedforward is also great to have in mind so the user knows e.g. what a button press does before it is pressed.


My first thoughts about the part on controls: This part feels to me like it's targeted towards people who don't use... stuff; who hasn't learned what kind of control should do what by just using standard products not made by imbeciles?

But then I started to think about where I've seen these simple "rules" about controls being broken before, and a great example came to me:
The original GoPro HD Hero had two buttons, and their functions – as described by  the company – are:

"Basics: Turn the camera on by holding the front button for 3 seconds; turn it off by doing the same. Press the front button to cycle though camera modes: press the top button to enter these modes/adjust settings."

GoPro HD Hero

Sounds simple enough. 
Unfortunately it is a pain to change settings (like resolution or picture mode) on this thing since one button is used as a one-way navigation to the next setting – with no way of coming back to the previous setting except going through ALL the other settings. The other button turns on/off the setting or cycle through options (such as different resolutions).
The way you have to go through all other settings to get back to the previous one really messes with my mental model of how it should work.

There are certainly a lot more examples of bad control use in our everyday lives. We should think through how we use controls in our design and what those controls should do.

Now I'm well over 400 words so here's my question:
Is the best idea for our project to do many low-fidelity prototypes and one final high-fidelity prototype, or just make one high-fidelity prototype and iterate on that?