Research of Design

From my initial first few analysis’ of the brief. I understand that the project is based on reading data from an existing source, then sorting that data, and making graphs that display the data. All of this should be an interactive website that the user can utilize without needing a lot of instructions, in other words, the design should be user friendly, to accomplish this, I will be looking at ‘Universal Design’ and how I can incorporate it into my project.

From my research of ‘Universal Design’ and the likes of Robert Dumitru, Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen and Ben Shneiderman, I believe Universal Design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design, as said by Ron Mace. The following is my own research on each individual mentioned.

Robert Dumitru

Robert Dumitru steps to designing a product are as follows, He believes that the first step in designing any product is to think about how you will document it. This involves elements such as client target, platforms and other relevant information to project design. The second step is ‘Product Design’, this is all about studying the research done by the marketing department and how the product can be placed on the market. The third step is ‘Project Analysis and Use Cases’, this about creating scenarios where a user would come into contact with the product and how they might react to certain features. The fourth step is ‘Concept’, this is where we begin to think about the physical features of the product and how it would respond. The fifth step is ‘Prototype’. This involves putting step four into reality and making a concept of the product. The sixth step is ‘The Visual’, this involves how the end-user would see the product. The last step is ‘Testing and Validating the Concept’, this involves re-designing the product to deal with issues that might have occurred.

Don Norman

Don Norman’s principles of designs begins with ‘Visibility’, this is referring to the design, the more the end-user can physically use, the more intrigued the end-user will be by the final product. Then Don goes on to his next step which is ‘Feedback’. This is where everyone who has tested the product will give formative feedback on how the product may be improved. This is followed by ‘Constraints’ which is limiting what the end-user can do with the product at a given moment. Next is ‘Mapping’, this refers to the relationship between controls and their effects in the world. After this is ‘Consistency’, this is about having a simple and easy to follow interface, such as clicking the left button on a mouse should always select something. Finally, the last principle is ‘affordability’, this is about making the product simple enough that the user can learn the functions without having to struggle too much.

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics for user interface design are as follows. The first is ‘Visibility of System Status’, the system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback. The second principle is ‘Match between system and the real world’, this is about making the product accessible to end-users, the product should not be complicated and should be easy to use. The third principle is ‘User Control and Freedom’, once again like the second principle, this is referring to making the product accessible for end-users. The fourth principle is also about accessibility. The fifth principle is ‘Error Prevention’, this is predicting what the end-user may do and preventing any problem from occurring before the end user is in a scenario where he is faced with the issue. The sixth principle is ‘Recognition rather than Recall’, this refers to making sure the user does not have to remember how to use certain functions. The seventh principle is ‘Flexibility and Minimalist design’ , the design should cater to both new users and experienced users appropriately. The eighth principle is ‘Aesthetic and Minimalist Design’, no unnecessary information should be displayed to the user. The Ninth principle is ‘Help Users Recognize, diagnose and Recover from Errors’. Error messages should suggest solutions to the end-user rather than showing the error in the coding language. The last principle is ‘Help and Documentation’, this refers to giving the end-user a simple guide in case he might need it.

Ben Shneiderman

Ben’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design involve the following. The first rule is ‘Strive for Consistency’, this refers to making sure the same function does the same action every single time. The second rule is ‘Enable frequent users to use shortcuts’, this refers to making the product accessible to inexperienced and experienced users appropriately. The third rule is ’Offer Formative Feedback’, this involves ensuring all actions result in some form of feedback for the end-user. The fourth rule is ‘Design Dialog to Yield Closure’, the product should give some form of satisfaction for completing actions. The fifth rule is ‘Offer Simple Error Handling’, this involves informing the end-user about the error that may have occurred and offering them simple feedback and how to resolve it. The sixth rule is ‘Permit Easy Reversal of Actions’, this involves allowing the user to go back and redo an action if he wishes to. This is to let the end-user reassure himself that he knows what he is doing. The seventh rule is ‘ Support Internal Locus of Control’, this involves making the end-user feel like he is in control instead of the system being in control. The last rule is ‘Reduced Short-Term Memory Load’, this involves the limitation of human information processing in short-term memory requires that displays be kept simple.

Similarities Between the Four

Robert does not go to any real users and instead avoids this by creating realistic scenarios about users interacting with his product whereas Jakob and Don consistently get feedback from end-users about the product which helps them in thinking about how the product may be improved or any issues which are recurring can be identified, of course this is a longer process than Robert’s but it is a more effective approach to better design. Ben also believes in formative feedback from the end-user in order to improve the product and shape it to how the end-user would like it.

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Response to the Brief

After my research of Universal Design I believe that accessibility for all types of user is the most important feature. I believe this is the most important for many reasons such as the inexperienced user will one day become an experienced user and if they still have to go through the same long process of using the product as they did when he first began using the product, the user may lose interest in the product and look for an alternative and more efficient product that suits his needs.

The project that I am currently working on will be aimed at Secondary School Teenagers, and I have a few reasons for choosing them as my target audience. The first reason being that I believe young people have the ability to change the world and therefore I wish to aim this project at them and hope they can take away the facts and incorporate the ideas that I have written in the project to make a better future for us now, and those to come. The second reason for secondary school teenagers being my target audience is that I believe they will have a bigger influence on society, they may be younger siblings at home with whom they can discuss climate change about, or even discuss the issue at hand with their friends or parents, who could then potentially discuss the topic further with their friends and colleagues.

Furthermore, from my research of universal design, it is highlighted that it is important to constantly test the project to make sure everything is working in a highly effective manner. This will be possible for me as my target audience is secondary school teenagers and my colleagues are in fact secondary school teenagers.

After my research of universal design, I believe I have enough knowledge to make an interactive website in a highly effective manner that will deal with all aspects of the brief.

I met with colleagues in school and asked them what they thought about the climate change pandemic. In general they all agreed that something had to be done about the situation and specifically they believed creating user friendly websites would encourage awareness into the situation.

Design Process

The Plan

To begin, I read the brief a couple of times in order to get an idea of what to work towards. I decided to work on a project that revolves around the country Pakistan and its temperature and precipitation over a set period of time, and I will relate this back to how climate change has influenced the increase or decrease in trends I hope to find a data set that I can download and clean using code in python. Then I intend to create code for graphs in order to have a visual representation of all the data. I believe this will be more appealing to my audience of students. I am unsure of how to do this so I will have to search for a method to do it online. Once this is done, I hope to have those graphs displayed on the report website surrounded by information about my chosen topic. To get information about my chosen topic will be slightly difficult as I don’t believe that there will be many qualitative resources online about the location I have chosen. If a trend is noticeable, I will discuss what actions can be taken in order to reduce the effects of Climate Change. This is because I believe it is not enough to educate people about climate change, it is also important to educate them about how the effects can be reduced.

The Process

Research

I found statistics on “https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/pakistan/climate-data-historical”, I chose this website as it had the data laid out in a very interactive and user-friendly way. The Portal provides an online platform for access to comprehensive global, regional, and country data related to climate change and development. The successful integration of scientific information in decision making often depends on the use of flexible frameworks, data, and tools that can provide comprehensive information to a wide range of users, allowing them to evaluate how to apply the scientific information to the design of a project or policy.

I began sorting and cleaning it to my liking. I created excel files which all had statistics for the set periods of time; 1901 - 1930, 1931 - 1960, 1961 - 1990, 1991 - 2016 and 1901 - 2016. I chose to do five periods of time per section as I believe it will provide a more factual and in-depth analysis of the data.

The design process began with adding the Microsoft Excel Sheets into their respective codes. Once I had added the Microsoft Excel Sheet to the code, I set in motion the coding aspect. The coding aspect began with opening the file and reading it, then I created empty lists to which I would add the appended statistics. I had these be printed for reassurance that the file had indeed been extracted. I will sort the data and write the temperature for each year to a separate csv file.

Following this, I began working on the ten graphs. The graph code included months and precipitation/temperature respectively. When the code is run, it creates the graphs which are then displayed. I downloaded the created graphs for use on the website for Secondary School Students.

Database Plan

I plan on creating the database with SQLite. To do this I will import the csv files into the graph. To do this, I will open up a blank SQLite and create a file with .csv at the end(Example File.csv) Then I will add all the data into that file and open up the console and begin by creating a table so that I can store the data. I will import the data from the csv file into the created table and then I should have a dataset.

Website Plan

To create the website, I plan on opening up a HTML, CSS, and Javascript programme. On this programme I will begin by creating the basic layout. I intend on starting the website with general knowledge about Climate Change, then introducing my case study of the country Pakistan, I will support the case study with graphs I created in relation to the temperature. Then I will have an interactive section that follows this that will have twelve questions. These questions are going to be along the lines of “Based on the fact the average temperature in January was ‘x’, can you guess the average precipitation in January?” This will have a box that says “Show Answer” which the user can click to display the answer. At the end of this interactive section, I intend on providing solutions to climate change in the country. This will be the end of the website.

Development of the Artefact

I began developing the artefact by using python to create graphs with the data that I had gathered. Following this, I downloaded the graphs to use later in the website. For the website I used a template from the website Bootstrap and edited it to make it my own.

I wrote about the information I gathered during my research phase and then displayed it on the website.

I found images on Google and added them to the assets section in order to display them on the website. I did this to make the website user friendly and intriguing.

Following this, I added the graphs to the website so that users can look at them and better understand the situation that the country is facing.

I proceeded to add a section where the user could view the average percipitation for Feburary to December and added a button to allow the user to guess what they think the percipitation for Januray is and then view it.

Problems Encountered

The first problem I ecountered was getting the image to fit into the slider, to overcome this, I added four images to one and let it slide while keeping in mind the colour contrast would keep it looking decent.

Another issue I faced was getting the button to display data from the database but I could not manage to get this to work even after spending numerous weeks in an attempt to get it to work.

Furthermore, while making the graphs, I had an issue where the same graph would be shown twice. This was due to me writing the incorrect code and was quickly fixed after reviweing the code.