Bonus- Rachael Smith

This class has taught me a lot. I think the biggest thing that I got out of this class is that if a professor is fun and genuinely cares about their work and students the students will care more about the subject and their work. I think this really showed in the final project and throughout the whole year. Being a graphic designer I didn't think there was much about design that I didn't know. However I have found more efficient and better ways to create and iterate my ideas. I also learned more about working in groups. I have always been a group worker but I am usually the group leader. In this class I had to learn to be the leader and just another member in a group. I made new friends and kept up with old ones in this class. I really enjoyed how fun and social this class was. I was also reintroduced to the magic of music. In high school I was in 3 bands in school. It always gave me that break in my day and I underestimated the importance of that when coming to college. Listening to music before class reminded me that sometimes we just need to take a step back, take a breath, and move on.

I really enjoyed this class and it has reminded me why I am studying what I am. I actually brought up the class and thoroughly discussed it in an interview for a summer internship at an interaction agency that I will hopefully be getting this summer (I find out Monday fingers crossed). I even took a risk I wouldn't have taken before this class in the interview and I think it worked to my advantage. I look forward to keeping in touch! Thank you for everything!

Bonus-Vincent Rowold

This class taught me a structured way of improving things. In order to improve something, you really need to have an idealized vision of it. In the game of HCI-D, you learn to take all the constraints and create a scope of your visions. By expanding on the scope of the visions, you can really narrow it down. The best can narrow it to a pinpoint. Next is taking that finely crafted vision and sharing it with others. With hard work, you can become better at sharing your visions with others by things like sketches or verbally. When another person captures your vision, that's when you have succeeded.

It's hard to create a vision of yourself and share it with yourself. Keeping the idealized self envisioned, you can compare your current self against it and take the steps to change. I am going to do a ton of self reflection and pinpoint the person that I want to be and become that person. Nothing is stopping me.

Hopefully this post is interesting enough haha
Have a great summer!

9-Vincent Rowold

I think sometimes help systems are needed but they are not substitutes for good design. For example, hooking up a VCR shouldn't be very hard if you've done hooked up something like it before. Red white and yellow cords should plug in to the back accordingly. Although I think this is obvious design, I don't know how many times I've had to talk my mother through hooking up a VCR through the phone. I think tutorial systems are needed for completely new systems or a completely new areas of  a user's mental model.

I think it's important to focus on the people that would bring the comic book companies money and cultural value.

78-Vincent Rowold

I know that usability tests are required for a good game of HCI-D. These test the design against real users to find the faults of the design. The iteration step is a revision of the design with the information gained by the usability tests. I also learned that most of the work in design is done before the prototyping (programming) aspect of it.

6-Vincent Rowold

The user's mental model with my full screen youtube on mobile devices is that there is only an expand and contract feature when watching videos on full screen. I don't think it's in their mental model to swipe left to right to view comments and related videos. The implementation model would clash with the mental model. A way to alleviate this is to create un obtrusive icons that would guide the user into swiping.

5-Vincent Rowold

One feature I had was to be able to turn the volume up or down during full screen mode by swiping the screen vertically up and down. There are other way of doing the same thing is using the volume buttons on the device to change the volume. Also, phones and tablets have their own systems to change volumes which is why there isn't a volume feature on the youtube app.

4-Vincent Rowold

I would say that the user is always correct in situations where they are extremely knowledgable in the design and how it works. The problem is that every user is different and designing for multiple users with different mental models is hard.

What Hoekman means by a situation-centric approach is to do research not only on the persona itself, but do research on that persona in that specific situation. For example, instead of asking people using an exercise bike what they think of an elliptical trainer, I'd ask someone using the elliptical.

3-Vincent Rowold

I think the design team wanted to create an easy intuitive way to unlock your phone. Since this is the first interaction a person has with their phone, they wanted to give an easy intuitive experience to butter the user up to the other features the phone has. They want the user to think everything about the phone is as easy as the "slide to unlock" button

2-Vincent Rowold

This is obvious design because each of these icons tells your exactly what you need to do and what happens when you do do when it happens. The affordance is high with the unlock button because it has an arrow to the right, looks like a button, and has a space that the button fits right into as you slide. The text tells you what to do and what it will do and the text also highlights in a wave motion from left to right telling you the direction to slide.

1-Vincent Rowold

Hey I'm Vincent Rowold. I go by Vince.
I'm a junior Informatics major from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
I play guitar and drums and love to jam in a group.
What worries me about this class is how unstructured I think design is. Doesn't worry me anymore.
That many processes can be thought of like a game.

Bonus - Michael Metzler

I started to look at college less of a GPA and more of an experience. Going to class to get something from it other than notes and a grade. What can I apply to work or my life? That is something I am trying to do outside of I300 which can be very hard because some professors suck, but I still try. I think I have always been giving back in some ways and not be conscious of it. Now that I am aware, I can focus on something big. I do not know what that is yet, but I am having fun in the mean time. Enjoying experiences while I am young and able is important along with learning from mistakes. I am not afraid to go try something new and fail. Every time I fail at something, I can learn and make myself a better person.

I am just iterating everyday on who I am, so I can be the best person I can be, not for a job or my family, but for myself. No other person has to live with me but me, so I will make sure that I am FUCKING AWESOME.

Thanks Marty for I300
It was quite the ride 

Bonus - Hyuk Beom Kwon

In the beginning of this course, I worried a lot because I am horrible at sketching and working in a team. I have done project 1, 2, and 3 on my own and I got pretty good scores on them. For project 4, which you required at least 2 people, I got pretty bad grade on it. So I ended up thinking that working in a team is definitely not a thing for me. However, when I started working on the final project with 3 other people, I realized the benefit of working as a team. The project was much less time consuming and more creative ideas were reflected than working on individual. I finally understood the importance of working as a team in this course. Although I got worse scores in final project than my individual projects, I realized good scores for my individual projects do not imply the better work than team works. I got good scores in individual works because I just followed instructions well.

Thank you for this wonderful course that helped me to apply learning to real practices in HCI design. I am sure that I will not forget the stuff I learned in this course for a long time. (I usually forget most stuff from other courses after finals) I always thought design is not a thing for me, since I suck at sketching, but got a bit confidence from advices of mentors in course for my projects. I am interested in going to graduate school in informatics and maybe will consider HCI design. I am sorry for not making an appointment with you to have some conversations, but I wish to ask you for some tips about graduate schools. Thanks a lot for teaching this class with enthusiasm.