Week 13 – Future Plans

Once I complete the BSIS degree at Pitt, I hope to attend Graduate School.   Currently, I’m interested in an MSIS or similar degree.

After I complete my studies, I hope to find a job in an Information Science related field.  I would really like to be able to apply what I learned and use it in real life settings.  I think this is an exciting field that has a lot of opportunities.  There are also a lot of different sub fields that will suit many different interests.

Hopefully my studies will help me narrow down a specialty that I particularly enjoy and I would be able to apply that to a new career.

Week 12 – Prototype Project

Positive – I appreciate the fact that we get to do several prototypes.  It is helpful to get feedback on the original design and be able to update.  Having testers evaluating the different layouts is also helpful.  That allows us to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Negative – I find the scope somewhat limiting.  I understand the prototype part follows naturally from the early parts of the group project where we analyzed the user groups.  And I actually do appreciate a clear cut objective to any project.  However, I do find designing just for the “Parents” user group a bit limited.

Week 10 – Homework 4 Topics

There are two general technology areas that I am interested in.  However, I’m not quite sure how to narrow them down or apply a human factors connection yet.

One is geospatial data.  I’m not sure yet what kind of application of geospatial data that I want to look into.  Maybe something to do with transportation, perhaps related to human migration patterns.  Also, when I worked for the USDA, I know there were a lot of GIS data collected on such things as location of farms, forests, conservation land, etc.  I know the USGS also do a lot of work with GIS data.  Perhaps some type of application for all that information.   I’m not quite sure how to look at this with a human factors perspective.

Second is space exploration.  There have been a lot of development in commercialization of space travel, replacement vehicle for the space shuttle, missions to Mars etc.  Maybe a closer look at one of these application would be an interesting topic.

Any advice are greatly appreciated!

p.s. This homework topic reminds me of an old video called Medieval Helpdesk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ).  In this case, the technology is the book.  During the implementation process, the user encountered a few problems.

Week 9 – Heuristics

My favorite topic from the first part of class was Usability Heuristics.

The main reason is I’ve not thought too much about design before.  When I encounter different websites, sometime I’ll think it was a good experience, other times, I will think how frustrating a website was.   I’ve not known the reasons for why certain websites feels great and why some don’t before.  I look at websites now with a critical eye.  Sometimes I look at an element and think, “ah, that’s why this doesn’t work.”  Or, I can think about what can be changed to make some elements better.  It is interesting to think about websites in a different way.

Week 6 – Social Media

I believe the use of social media for class should be situational.  I don’t believe it is always suitable or needed.  There are many classes where adding a social media component would serve no purpose.  I do not believe it is useful to add social media simply for the sake of saying you have social media.

Social media should be used for class if it serves a concrete purpose.  For example, many researchers are using data from social media as their information sources.  So perhaps students can conduct surveys or other information gathering activities on social media.  They could also be a convenient place to present projects to a wider audience.  For example, posting a video of a group project on YouTube.  In these type of situations, I do believe it can and should be used for classes.

Week 5 – Museum

One of the more memorable visits in recent years was when I visited New York and saw The Frick Collection.  I was on vacation with my brother.  We had planned on visiting many of the famous sights of New York.  We both enjoy museums, so there were many on the itinerary.  I’ve never heard of The Frick Collection before, but my brother recommended it highly.

I was not disappointed.  It was a great collection of art.  Having visited quite a few famous museums of Europe, and just visited the bigger ones in New York, I was expecting a smaller museum derived from a private collection to seem lackluster.  I was wrong.  It was a concentrated dose of very high quality art displayed beautifully.

Week 4 – Least Favorite Websites

My least favorite website is the intranet for my last workplace.  Aesthetically, it is pretty bland and not very exceptional.  Functionally, however, there were some issues.  The most common complaint from users was “I can’t find anything”.  This was true for me as well, even though I helped upload information to this intranet.  In theory, this intranet was set up fairly logically. There are tabs on the top of the page.  Pull down menus under the tabs help direct the user to more specific topics that they are interested in.  And then each page is set up with sub-topics.  Some sidebars contained common links and helpful tables.  All the pages are set up similarly, so that if an user is used to one page, they should be able to navigate another page.  However, in reality, it was very hard for people to find any information.   One of the reasons is that it requires a lot of recall on the part of the user.  An user will have to remember exactly what department (tab) an subject fell under and exactly what topic (on the pull-down menu) where they want to go.  If the person that uploaded the information classified it under a different department or topic, then the user will be looking in the wrong place.   The intranet simply grew more and more cumbersome as more information is loaded onto it.  There were some improvements made through user feedback and certain aspects of the website were simplified.  However, it became an cycle where things will get simplified for awhile and then the intranet will grow again.

Aesthetically speaking, some of my least favorite websites have been news websites lately, especially the ones tied into TV channels.  They have become so overloaded with commercial ads, video links and graphics that they are just information overload.  Sometimes the titles of the news articles are very sparse and they rely on the pictures attached to articles to attract clicks.   Of course, that is not to say that there aren’t interesting videos or other news items linked to the website.  It is just very hard to scan through the websites to find the news articles that is of interest to me.  I’ve found that some news aggregators or websites based on print news organizations are somewhat less graphic intensive and easier to browse and take in information. Native advertising is another issue that becomes more and more troublesome to me.  Because some websites intentionally makes it hard to distinguish betweens news and ad, it makes the website less useful to me.  With native advertising, they are not really fulfilling their functions as “news” websites.

Week 1 – Goals

My goal for this class is to learn about how to present information so that it is meaningful and useful. 

In our first class, we saw some examples of bad designs.  The consequences of bad design could be trivial, such as time wasted in figuring out whether to push or pull a door.  The consequences could also be substantial, such as increase in mortality rate for a hospital.  It is not enough to merely make information available.  It is necessary to make information accessible. 

My goal for this class is to learn about why and how to design systems that can present information in the best way.   I also hope to learn through real life examples and hands on practice.