Telling a Story

After a hiatus due to travel, a blogpost that encapsulates the last ~ week of research and work is due. This helps the interested student, researcher, coder, designer, and/or person understand an *amazing* resource for this thought process. Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer, presents a compelling story of how design should be done and is done via his book Designing Interactions. The link is below:

http://www.designinginteractions.com/bill

Thought one would need to read this book many times, and I cannot pretend that I am a season veteran (or have finished the book, yet) but there are some notes I have already uncovered reading Bill's words. His initial foray into this book starts with personal stories relating his thoughts in a more personal domain to the reader. *This* by itself is designing an interaction in such a way that the domain the user is experiencing it will be most optimal. From my initial findings there are several contextual design lessons that have surfaced.

1. Understand the Guest - This means that when you design any piece of software (or anything) you have to fully immerse yourself, first!, into what the end user wants. I've frequently found myself making software going off of my assumptions, what I want, or other flawed vectors into design. Unless this project will be solely used by you, which in that case means you should only listen to your needs, you'll need to become a chameleon and immerse yourself into the user's world. When will they use it? How will they use it? How much time will they have when using it? What is the environment when they will use it? Mobile? Home? Work? Outside? These are all important questions that need to be answered thoroughly when making anything.

2. Storytelling - Human beings are great visual beings. We crave the ability to visualize events that have occurred. Ever think about how much more powerful a point is to your friend when you put it into a very visual story? Exaggerations always beget the best jokes. These nuanced parts of life are often overlooked but have powerful undertones.

3. Solve a problem - Most everything that is designed for other people needs to address this important, obvious yet often overlooked point. Solve a problem for someone. What is the problem? LinkedIn solved having information for individuals in the business space. Groupon solves having cut rate deals on the fly. Southwest solves having cheap yet professional airfare. Solve a problem; always.

Code will be updated very soon for the process of researching and getting ready for the initial RCOS presentation have left the coding secondary. Since this entire project is on the correct way of building software, I am weary of hopping right into the code.Code base is there and development schedule will be stuck to but the development schedule is such so that coding is more heavy in the last 60% of the project rather than the first 40%.

-Sean