The cultural shift in design towards more UCD approaches means that rather than an expert team of designers conducting video analysis, we now see a strong emphasis placed on the value of involving end users in addressing usability issues before a design is finalised. This change in attitudes and more active role users play in UCD approaches means that the methods, such as the video card game, must enable experts and lay persons (users) to ‘speak the same language’, which is why the video card game was created!

The video card game is centred around framing video as a ‘design material’, much like we think of colour, line and form as design materials. As interaction designers, we develop experience and receive training throughout our education resulting in a level of skill when analysing interactions, meaning we are trained to analyse video. The video card game makes video-recorded interactions tangible, enabling design teams to quickly analyse a large amount of video material in a relatively short space of time.

Simultaneously, the method allows those without any experience in interaction design or video analysis to contribute their own insights and experiences when addressing a specific usability issue you may be facing.

While there are a variety of uses for the video card game, such as the activity outlined here, we do recommend further reading the paper where the method was first published. Our example activity looks at using the video card game to create themes for tangible interaction but there are many other ways you might think about using this method, such as:

• Familiarising yourself with new interactions;
• Addressing a specific usability issue in a new or revised design;
• Generating themes and new ideas for a project;
• Augmenting the video cards with AR technologies, or perhaps adding an element of tangible interaction to the cards using NFC or RFID technology.

Activity

Before you start

The video card game is often used by design teams to address specific usability issues and in these instances the video cards are populated with stills taken from video that focuses on the issue to be addressed. The method can also be used to generate new ideas in the form of ‘themes’, and we’ve chosen to follow this approach in the following activity.

Rather than you, the designer, facilitating the activity with prospective users or a group of research participants, you’ll be working with material that focuses on movements and gesture articulated with the hands. This approach to focusing the card game results in the generation of themes around tangible interaction.

As you become more experienced with the method, we encourage you to think about replacing the provided printable cards and associated video clips with your own materials. These could be taken from video of users interacting with a prototype, related clips focused on specific actions or interactions – the method is very versatile and can be used in a variety of ways. So long as the material you’re working with is video, then the method can be used to help make sense of it!

The following activity requires at least 2 people, but we’ve found this generative approach to using the method is best suited to collaborative projects as you’ll be generating themes and input from others helps to expand on these themes, making them richer. If you don’t have access to more than 2 people, think about discussing your themes with peers, colleagues or perhaps using an organisational method such as Octopus Clustering when you have access to more people.

Activity steps

1. Dealing the cards: Choose a set of 10 video clips with your partner that you both find interesting – see here for the clips. Print out 2 sets of cards for each person participating in the card game as well as at least 3 of the theme templates – we’ve found that this activity usually produces 3 strong themes but may lead to more, so print more theme templates at step 4 if you need them. Cut out the cards.
2. Reading the cards: In your pair, without talking, watch each of the clips together and write down your ideas, observations and notes directly on to each of the cards. This step forms your initial ‘reading’ of the cards and it’s important that your notes are recorded directly onto the cards as they provide context to your thinking as the activity unfolds.
3. Arranging your hand: compare notes with your partner and begin to discuss your observations on each of the video clips. Don’t be afraid to make further notes on your cards if something useful or important arises in discussion. Once you’re both satisfied with your notes, begin to organise your cards into themes. These themes should be focused on commonalities in the way you’ve both interpreted the video clips. Some themes might be more concrete or obvious, focusing on what is easily observable in the video, while other themes might be more abstract and subject to your pair’s own unique interpretation of the video. Not all of the cards will easily fit into themes and you may have a card that fits into multiple themes – this is where your duplicate cards come in handy!
4. Collecting and discussing card families: this step will vary depending on how you’ve run the card game so follow the steps relevant to your number of people.
   • For groups of 2: Use the provided theme templates to record your themes. We suggest using blue-tac or tape at this stage in case you’d like to revisit and build on the themes. It’s at this step in the activity that you would share your themes with others and they might contribute cards and suggestions on how you might further refine the theme – so think about presenting your themes to a peer or colleague and consider their input. Also think about repeating the activity with a different set of 10 cards and see how those cards might influence your themes. The key to this activity is to keep an open, exploratory attitude!
   • For groups greater than 2: Use the provided theme templates to record your themes but do not use glue (yet!) to affix the cards to the templates as they’ll be moving around. Present your themes to the other people in your larger group. Explain the meaning behind each theme, how you’ve interpreted each of the clips and why you’ve chosen specific clips for each theme.
     
     Others might contribute cards from their own set of cards (this is where those duplicates come in handy again!) if they fit into your theme, while themes might expand, collapse, break apart or be removed entirely. Approaching this step with an open mind and attitude of accepting change is important as we expect themes will (and should) change! A ‘strong’ theme is often the result of multiple iterations so you might repeat this step once or twice as needed.
5. Once themes are finalised, adhere them using glue to the theme template, fill in any further details and you’re done! These themes might be used to inform further design development, act as a rough model to ideate further from and can even be considered as a form of data to base further research on.

References

1. Buur, Jacob, and Astrid Soendergaard. 2000. ‘Video Card Game: An Augmented Environment for User Centred Design Discussions’. In Proceedings of DARE 2000 on Designing Augmented Reality Environments, 63–69. DARE ’00. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/354666.354673.

Sketchnotes can be used to aid in your day-to-day studies, for example when recording notes on a lecture, tutorial, workshop, academic paper or book chapter, as well more design-specific practices such as capturing a design process, plan, visualisation, concept or idea. You might use sketchnotes to communicate a concept to a design team too, as their underlying value is in their ability to capture a lot more detailed information when compared to purely textual notes.

The combination of image and text within sketchnotes allows for implicit or tacit information to be recorded directly within your notes, which affords your notes more context and richer detail.

A key misconception about sketchnoting is you must be great at sketching to take great sketchnotes, which is quite untrue! The process of sketchnoting tends to help designers actually exercise and refine their sketching ability, but you do not need to possess any particular sketching ability to produce sketchnotes. As with generalised notetaking and sketching, everyone will develop their own style and this is encouraged – but do keep in mind that your sketchnotes should be relatively legible and self-explanatory, like a mind-map but with more detail!

Sketchnoting uses a visual language that includes but is not limited to: text, emphasis text, basic shapes, containers, connectors, icons and symbols, sketches and illustrations, shading and colours. We’ll go into further detail about these different elements in the following activity, but the key takeaway to remember about sketchnoting is that it’s an accessible, practical and simple method that can help you to produce more useful notes.

Activity

Before you start

While sketchnoting might seem quite time consuming, especially if you don’t regularly practice sketching, this is another common misconception. Through regular practice, you’ll begin to develop a style of sketchnoting that allows you to capture ideas visually that might be difficult or time consuming to express solely through text. In our experience, sketchnoting is especially useful when used in place of conventional notetaking to record notes on lectures and academic readings.

We’ve found that lectures and readings specific to interaction design tend to express both theoretical concepts and well as their implications for design practice. It is the relationship and connections between interaction design theories and practices that can be some of the most important information and at times, difficult to capture with written notes. The following activity suggests a basic outline of how you might approach sketchnoting a lecture or reading.

Activity steps

1. In place of a contents page in your sketchbook, write down 15-20 common words or phrases you envision you’ll use often in your note taking. Some examples based on our experience include:
   • Idea, process, user/s, technology, prototype, website, app, iteration, team, theory, practice, framework, toolkit, sketch, team and development.
2. Assign a unique, recognisable icon or pictogram to each of these words/phrases in your list. By following this process you’re creating a kind of visual library and reference tool that can be implemented throughout your sketchnotes, saving you both time and improving your ability to recall important pieces of information when both recording and reviewing your notes.
3. Start sketchnoting! Use varying colours, line weights, icons, pictograms, arrows to create hierarchy, organisation and structure. Draw on your visual library of icons and over time, refine this list. You might notice some words are used often, while others very little or not at all. Develop this library and make changes as relevant, adding and removing items as necessary.
4. Review your sketchnotes and focus on what is and isn’t working for you. The key to effective sketchnoting is to be persistent and critical about your process, while ensuring that the most important information is easily identifiable and memorable. Consider adding emphasis to the key finding, theory, principle or process described in the lecture or reading you sketchnoted.

References

1. Rohde, Mike. 2012. The Sketchnote Handbook:  The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking. 1st edition. Peachpit Press. QUT Library Permalink.

In recent years, the SCAMPER method has been widely used by designers who praise the method’s simplicity and capacity to generate a large amount of new ideas. In our experience, the SCAMPER method can be most valuable when you encounter ‘creative block’ or find yourself seemingly ‘going in circles’ when working on a project or trying to overcome a particularly tricky design problem.

We have provided a template that follows the SCAMPER acronym, which can be used for ideation in your projects.

References

1. Eberle, Bob. 1996. Scamper: Games for Imagination Development. Prufrock Press Inc.

As design practitioners, we tend to get into a state of ‘flow’ when working on a project, often making hundreds of subtle decisions without even realising it. These decisions are always informed by a kind of subjective criteria that we impose on task at hand. While you may not have clearly articulated these criteria, they do exist and the reflection-in-action method can help you to become more aware of these criteria, and perhaps interrogate or question them. Reflection-in-action doesn’t involve any formalised process, and it more so an attitude or way of thinking. When beginning to work through a design project, clearly articulate your goals and as you make decisions, take a moment to pause and critically think about what you’re doing. It often helps to ask, “why am I doing this?”, as well as “why am I doing this, in this particular way?”. Over time you will begin to enact this kind of critical interrogation and reflective way of thinking implicitly, which can lead to richer, more critically informed design decisions.

While reflection-in-action focuses on in-the-moment decision making, refection-on-action is retrospective, taking place after the action has occurred. It is through pairing these two kinds of reflection that practitioners can come to a much deeper understanding about their cognitive processes and clearly articulate their ‘practitioner frameworks’ – the subjective decision-making criteria we were talking about above. We suggest a rigorous approach to reflection-on-action, such as keeping a design journal, where you can record reflections on your current projects. Get into the habit of reflecting at regular intervals, which should be flexible to accommodate changes in projects. For example, if you’re working on a variety of projects you might make reflective notes before moving between projects, whereas you might reflect at the end of the day if focussing on a single project.

Activity

Before you start

Before you begin reflecting you need to make a decision about the format in which you’ll record your reflections – are you going to work analogue or digitally? Both of these mediums have a wide array of advantages and disadvantages. While a traditional journal is accessible and a seemingly obvious place to start, it can become difficult to organise and manage your reflections as you start to produce a large number of them. Digital alternatives, such as keeping a blog for reflections, note taking software and digital journals can make organisation, searching and sharing reflections very efficient. The limitations of these digital formats vary but a common issue is that digital mediums don’t facilitate the same kind of expressive, spontaneous and ‘messy’ reflections that are possible with a physical journal. In our experience, we find keeping a physical journal for everyday reflections, where notes and sketches on general practice, research and projects are detailed and reflected upon as well as a personal blog is a happy medium. When we’re working on projects, we find it much easier to take quick notes in a physical journal and build reflections from there, while we find a blog is a great place to upload any images of prototypes, relevant research and write accompanying reflections.

Experiment with different formats for your reflections – remember you’re aiming to develop a reflective practice – which takes practice! For reflection to become valuable and useful to you, it must become habitual, so we suggest starting small and developing a simple, sustainable reflective routine. Thinking of reflecting on your practice as a burden or additional task will likely make you disinterested and disengaged, so again, experiment and try a variety of different ways of reflecting until you determine what works best for you.

The following activity is a quick and easy approach to recording reflections when you’re finished working on a project for the day and provides a few prompts to get you thinking critically about your practice.

Activity steps

1. In your journal, begin your entry with the date and title of the project or task you worked for the day. If you worked on various projects, we recommend organising your reflections by project as this will allow you to critically reflect on each of them as well as draw comparisons between them.
2. Depending on your available time and level of engagement, you might choose to reflect in short paragraphs, in a series of notes or using dot-points. There are no rules for reflection and it’s common that you might vary your format between and even within reflections. We do recommend that you make a summary of key points at the end of your reflection as this will aid in revision as well as enhance your capacity to remember your ‘findings’.
   
   Consider using this list of questions to structure and guide your reflections:
   • What did you do? A brief description of the task here is sufficient.
   • How did you do it? What was the process applied to the task?
   • What skills and/or experiences did you draw upon?
   • What is the goal or aim of the broader project?
   • How did your activities contribute towards realising this goal or aim?
   • What was successful? What could be improved? This might apply to practical tasks or activities as well as the processes or methods used to undertake them.
   • Is the project heading in the right direction? If so, what can be done to keep it moving forward? If not, what can be done to course-correct?
   • Summarise the key points using dot-points. Underline or highlight them if you’ve used dot-points to format your reflections.
     
     This is by no means an exhaustive list, rather, it’s a list of prompts to provoke a reflective and critical mindset. We highly encourage you to build, adapt, expand and/or reorder the list to suit your own style of reflection.
3. Don’t be afraid to doodle, sketch and style your reflections. Relevant imagery such as sketches of concepts, project details, images of prototypes and diagrams can all aid in communicating your thinking while also prompting recall – use whatever tools suit you!
4. Keep track of your reflections – consider setting yourself a time limit if you tend to over-explain, or conversely, allocating a specific amount of daily reflection time.
5. Practice, practice, practice! Reflective practice is not only a practice in and of itself, but it takes practice – there is no time wasted reflecting on your work as a designer so keep practising your reflective practice!

Notes

If you haven’t already read about sketchnoting it’s both worthwhile taking a look at and considering as a format for your reflections.

You might be familiar with ‘reflective writing’ as a style of writing, much like descriptive, analytical and academic are all styles of writing. In essence, reflective writing shares much of the same underlying aims we’ve described here about reflective practice – developing an ability to critique your work through reflection on it.

The subtle difference in ‘reflective writing’ for an assessment item and the kind of writing you undertake when reflecting on your practice is one of conventions. When writing reflectively for an assessment item you will need to adhere to whatever format and structure is outlined for the assessment, whereas your own reflective practice is very much that – your own, meaning you have complete freedom to write in whatever format suits you best.

Keeping this in mind can help you to apply your critical, reflective thinking to more conventional writing structures. If an assessment item requires a reflective writing style or if you’re simply interested in learning more about the style, check out the reflective writing resources available via the QUT CiteWrite website.

References

1. Schön, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books. QUT Library Permalink.

Much like the SCAMPER method, the PACT framework entails breaking down a design project or problem into a small number of parameters or elements, which enables a designer to reframe their current line of thinking and helps to illuminate often overlooked elements of a project. The PACT framework can be especially useful in scoping out a project in its infancy, as well as uncovering gaps in a more developed project as a way to direct further research. Unlike the SCAMPER method, the PACT framework can be used for both ideation and analysis, making it a very powerful tool for any designer to familiarise themselves with.

We have provided a template that follows the organisation of the PACT framework that can be used to apply the framework in an analysis for your projects.

References

1. Benyon, David, Phil Turner, and Susan Turner. 2005. Designing Interactive Systems: People, Activities, Contexts, Technologies. Addison-Wesley.

Unlike the other entries in this guide, affordances are not a method, rather, they’re a theory, which was coined by psychologist James J. Gibson and has been further expanded upon and popularised in the field of HCI by Donald Norman. While Gibson defines affordances as all possible interactions between an object and user¹, Norman contextualised affordances to HCI, with his reframed definition stating that affordances include only the interactions with objects that can be perceived by users².

A simple example here is that a while a user might be able to throw a chair and sit on a tennis ball, they will most likely sit on the chair and throw the tennis ball. This seemingly subtle distinction in definition is quite important to keep in mind, as perception plays a fundamental role in how users make sense of what is possible when interacting with objects, whether they be physical or digital.

While affordances with physical objects draw from our existing experience of interactions with the real world, affordances of screen-based environments do not play by the same rules. While early design of user interfaces sought to mimic their real-world counterparts, a trend known as ‘skeuomorphic design’, the advent and uptake of ‘flat design’ saw these rules being re-written. Over time the need to give users clues as to what interactions were possible by mimicking real-world objects (the trash can being a great example) began to diminish. Eventually, flat design afforded the same user interactions as their skeuomorphic counterparts because users had learned to perceive interfaces differently.

Whether designing for screen-based, tangible or hybrid interaction projects, an awareness and understanding of affordances theory can aid in helping you to create projects that enable seamless, intuitive and effective interactions.

Activity

Before you start

In this activity you’ll select an everyday object and conceptualise how it might be reimagined to send an email. The process involves conducting a brief analysis of the object, extracting insights and then applying these insights to inform a design concept. Consider pairing this activity with physical prototyping to produce a lo-fi mockup of your concept.

Activity steps

1. Select an everyday object from around your house – aim for something that has a few different physical qualities such as a water bottle, tea kettle, umbrella, dinner plate – whatever captures your attention! If you’re struggling, tools and kitchen utensils are another place to look for inspiration.
2. Critically engage with the physical qualities of your chosen item and list these down. Think about shape, texture, colours, varying materials, any mechanisms that allow for interaction.
3. Now begin to list down the different ways in which you can physically interact with the object and break these down even further. Aim for varying levels of detail when analysing your object, ranging from broad, obvious features right down to minute, specific details.
   • In what ways can you touch it?
   • How can you move it or move with it?
   • What are the different gestures that can be enacted with the object?
   • Can it be thrown? Rotated?
   • Is it malleable or rigid?
4. Now with your list of findings from the analysis, start to think about how each of these findings could be reframed as technical functions used to send an email. List down the following points:
   • Typing the email
   • Styling the text – bold and italics
   • Inserting attachments
   • Addressing the sender
   • Sending the email
5. Now start to draw relationships between your analysis and the functions required to send an email – how can they be mapped – explore how it feels to interact with your object in this way.
6. Once you’re satisfied with your outcome, you’re essentially finished exploring the object’s affordances! Consider documenting your findings through sketches and notes in a journal, especially if you intend to work with this new concept and further develop (as mentioned above, perhaps through Physical Prototyping).

References

1. Gibson, James Jerome. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. QUT Library Permalink.
2. Norman, Don. 2002. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. QUT Library Permalink.