Week 9 | International Design For The International Audience

Design becomes more complicated by the audience that it aims for. A more international audience calls for a more cultural-sensitive design. When aiming for a specific kind of culture, plenty of research needs to be done for the design to be suitable for that particular set of culture. Paper and envelope sizes vary depending on which country it comes from as well as address formats. 

As well as being culturally aware, the design also needs to be politically aware. Colours that are associated with political movements or national flags should be avoided and integrating text in images should also be avoided as it cannot be translated by an online translator. Generic icons are encouraged as well as the allowance of text expansion to make it easier when translated into English.

To make it easier, a product could also have an option of selecting the desired country for the product to be custom made for the user. This way the product will be more specific on the the selected culture and users will be able to experience a more culturally-accurate product.

Different People. Different Ways. Different Styles.

When designing for a different party, there are lot of “rules and regulations” to be carefully observed and followed in order to avoid misunderstanding and disputations. What size should be used? Which font is the most appropriate? Which color should be avoided? And so on. Every little details need to be abided in order to match some of the particular requirements.

Sizes and formats for papers, envelopes, calling cards, and etc; they are vary from each countries, depending on their standard specifications. Besides, addresses formats are differ for each place, which should be properly followed. All these are some of the criteria that needed to be carefully considered and conformed. Try to avoid using fonts or text in any image formats that are hard for the online translator to translate. Some things occurs to be in different meaning in some countries, so better study and at least try to avoid it as it can actually causes misunderstanding or even may lead to some sensitive issues.

These products should be equipped with options of selecting the supposed country so that it’ll corresponds with the selected country accordingly, decreasing the errors and confusions.

Different Culture, Different Design?

Every culture has different understanding and experience from the other. Thus, sometimes the designer need to design according to one’s culture to enable people from other countries could use the product. Some criterias that could be use in designing for different culture are international standard paper sizes, envelope sizes and address format. Try to avoid from using text in any image format because it could not be translated by online translator. Also, allow space for text expansion.

Be sensitive with the signs, colours, symbols used because it could meant an entirely different thing in other culture. Use generic icon instead. Ensure that the product supports various calendar, date and time formats. Make sure it also support various currencies.

Designers could decide on their own whether they wanted to produce an internationally appeal website where everyone from every countries could understand when they access the website/product or tailor-made the website/product according to one’s culture.

Prototyping : ?

A prototype is a mockup or can also be defined as electronic ‘picture’. It allows the stakeholders to interact with an envisioned product, gain experience in realistic setting and explore imagined uses. A prototype is a limited representation.

By prototyping, it gives aids when discussing ideas with stakeholders. It is a communication device among team members as well as an effective ways to test ideas. It clarifies vague requirements.

There are two types of prototypes; Low-Fidelity and High-Fidelity. Low fidelity prototypes do not look very much like the real final product. The materials used are often very different from the final product. This type of prototyping is cheap and quick to produce. It supports the exploration of alternative ideas/designs. Besides, it is important during conceptual design process.

High-fidelity on the other hand looks much more like what the real product would be. It often uses materials that we would expect to be in the final outcome. It is more accurate than low-fidelity prototyping. However, it takes a long time to build and the developers are reluctant to change something they have crafted for hours.

Week 8 | Prototyping

Prototype

A model or first model of the intended future product. It functions as a visual example for the creators to find out how it will fare out once it is confirmed to become an actual product to be sold in the market. Bugs, problems would be easily seen by the creation of the product prototype. Stakeholders can also envision the product in its intended form and for users to be able to interact with it as realistically as possible.

Prototypes comes in different forms. Ones that do not look that similar with the intended product are low-fidelity prototypes. Mostly used during the conceptual design, it is a simple and quick way to show the general form of the product without needing to spend all the costs to use actual materials that would be used for the final thing.

High-fidelity prototypes are realistic models of the final product. It uses the actual materials that would be then later be used for the final thing and is as close to to the final product as it can be. It gives a much more accurate model that can be used to test out ideas or approaches with the future users to see how it would fare out when it is used by the intended audience.Though more costly than the low-fidelity prototype, it is helpful in finding out major problems that can be fixed before the production of the final product and in turn would help to save the company a lot of money and time from building a faulty product.

Design and Prototyping

Prototype is the smaller scale, still of bugs and haven’t properly functioned yet. It is meant for the user to interact with the envisioned product, gain experience in realistic setting and explore imagined functions. It is a helpful aid to communicate with team members. There are two types of prototyping, low-fidelity and high-fidelity.

Low fidelity prototype is the one that does not look much like the final product. It uses material that are very different from the intended final version such as paper and cardboard. It tends to be simple, cheap and quick to produce. It is important during conceptual design but not actually will be included in the final design.

High fidelity prototype on the other hand uses material that you would expect to see in the final product. It takes longer time to be build and a lot of difficulties would ensue as a software prototype can set higher expectations. However, it is useful for selling ideas and for testing out technical issues.

As a conclusion, prototype is definitely important in designing as it helps the designer to improve the product before it was officially released.

Requirements

Requirements are very important in meeting demands or expectation of user especially in designing the products. According to Wikipedia, it is a statement that identifies a necessary attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a user. Requirements must be specific, unambiguous and clear. There are four types of product requirements; architectural, functional, non-functional and constraint.

In layman terms, requirements are what the user expected the product to be, what the product supposed to provide, what the characteristics of the product and the goal the product is supposed to enable the users to do.

Functional requirements are defining the functions and high level logic of what the product/software/website able to do. Whileas, non-functional requirements specify the criterias and attributes of the product/software/website. In general, functional describe what the product supposed to do by defining the functions while non-functional describe how the product supposed to be.

Week 7 | Requirements

Every product has requirements. It's no different in this field. 

A search on the definition of requirement on the internet will turn up as

- a nessecitate

- To call for as obligatory or appropriate

In this case, it is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should or how it should perform. It should be specific, ambiguous and as clean as possible.

To gather a set of reliable and stable requirements, one should first set themselves to do data gathering.

Data which is sufficient, relevant and appropriate has to be collected to proceed. There are many ways such as to do this. Interviews, focus groups, creating questionnaires and various kinds of observations are just a few of the methods that can be used to collect date from potential users. They all are useful in different ways and the best ones can be custom selected to best fit the needed aim.

• Interviews -->  These are effective in getting people to explore the issues, they can be customized to be structured, semi structured or completely unstructured. 
• Focus groups --> Important in the meeting of future or current stakeholders.
• Questionnaires --> Best at gaining an agreement ad highlighting problematic areas and disagreements during the requirements activity. 

These are just some of the methods and many more can be used to their full advantage to get the most data out of the activities. These are all of course influences by other factors such as the nature of the task, participants and the available resources.

  

Requirements : ?

What is requirement? According to Wikipedia, a requirement is a singular documented physical and functional need that a particular product or service must be or perform. In other words, requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform. It should be as specific, unambiguous and as clear as possible and we must know how to tell when they have been fulfilled. It is most commonly used in a formal sense in systems engineering, software engineering, or enterprise engineering. There are types of requirements; Functional Requirements and Non-Functional Requirements. Functional requirement captures the intended behavior of the system. This behavior may be expressed as services, tasks or function the system is required to perform or in a simpler way, it is what the system should do. Non-Functional requirement includes constraints and qualities. Qualities are properties or characteristics of the system that its stakeholders care about and hence will affect their degree of satisfaction with the system while a constraint is a restriction on the degree of freedom we have in providing a solution.