The Trunk Test

Find 5 people (who are not in this class) between now and next Tuesday (2/27/07) and preform the "Trunk Test with one of the interior pages of your design.

You will do this by:

1) Opening your page in Photoshop and applying a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 1.5 pixels.
2) Print out the page and hand it to your victim and ask them to circle each item on this list.

- Site ID.
- Page name
- Section and subsections (main navigation)
- Local navigation (secondary navigation)
- "You are here" indicator(s)
- Search

3) Time them while they preform these tasks - you're watch must have a second hand.
4) Report the time in seconds it took your test subjects to find all the pieces and record it in your journal.
5) Ask the participants to talk out loud while they search for the items and take notes on their comments. Record it in your journal.

2/22/07

Today, we critique project 3, Site Redesign. You will need to present your work to the class, explain your design decisions and then we will start the next phase of the design process.

Work Day... mostly

Today, a little design talk. Starting with a tangent about the Open Source car.

Also, we will look at some of your fellow students usability discoveries.

Finally we will have time to work in class on the redesign projects.

For Thursday:
A class critique and begin the steps for an "extra special" step in the design process.

TANGENT ALERT:

From this month's Fast Company: Open source car... what could this mean for the automobile? Who knows, but when you think about the paradigm of the automobile, other than incremental changes in technology and safety advances, cars are pretty much what they have been for decades. For the most part they have 4 wheels (the front two turn), a combustion engine, rack and pinion steering, disk and/or drum breaks and mechanical systems for acceleration, breaking and steering.

What kind of innovation would occur if you had a couple thousand designers working on a car design rather than a few dozen? What if these designer were both industry insiders and people who simply have a passion for cars? Chaos? Maybe, but it works pretty well for software. It's almost Darwinian, in that the best ideas survive the scrutiny of brother and sister contributors. The ideas have a better chance of surviving based on the merit of their worth. So, OScar, I'll be rooting for you.