Interaction Design

I wanted the site to clear, simple, and concise. The viewer needs to be able to quickly a easily access and assimilate the information provided. Hopefully this graphic explains things for you.

When I first got this assignment, I had a hard time seeing the correlation between pygmy goats and interaction design. But then I realized almost immediately how perfect this assignment was in teaching two things:

1. The strong relationship between InDesign paragraph/character styles and CSS Style sheets, and
2. The simple fact that interaction design is all about communication to the viewer.

This assignment cemented in my mind even more the importance of organization, and I don’t mean just of categories of goat articles. Going through each article and identifying h1, h2, h3, p, etc. is one of the most key things I can think of when designing for the web. Even if we as designers are not hand coding it, we need to create a clear hierarchy for each page we design.

Because we were asked to import style sheets into various different articles that had the sames tags (h1, h2…) applied to them, we had to be meticulous in identifying those tags and making sure everything matched up, or else the style sheet wouldn’t work properly. By doing this, we really did create a book that looked as if it was created by on designer. This helped me to understand even more how styling for the web works. I learned that designing for the web isn’t all that different from designing for print, in the fact that there needs to be a clearly defined styles and hierarchy; you can’t just change the size or style of your main headline from page to page.

This assignment also taught me the importance of organization of the information itself. I think that doing the table of contents helped me a lot to realize that a reader needs to be able to look at it and know how to find what they want. It doesn’t matter how pretty it looks if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Knowing this is a web design class, I couldn’t help but thinking about how the main navigation, sub navigation, sub-sub navigation and so on would look. It made it a little easier to organize the information by visualizing myself as the reader, then choosing a random article and then deciding where I would logically go first in order to find that information. I hope that made sense.

Anyway, all in all, I learned a lot from this assignment. I really appreciated your critique in class about how to present to business-minded people. They don’t care what font you used. You need to have a real reason for design choices that corresponds to their objectives. This was a very informative project.

When I first started working on the pygmy goat project I didn’t think I was going to learn much. To my surprise I got a lot out of the project and learned how important it is to organize information well.

I learned how content and style need to be separate so that everything would go well when we tried to connect all of our separate parts into one paper.  We combined a couple of the group designs into one design. This gave my group a chance to talk together and figure out what parts of the information was most important and what needed to be largest. This helped me to understand a little bit more about how a website works.

I was able to learn a lot more about in-designs importing style sheets, master pages, paragraph styles and more. It was nice to have a group to bounce ideas off of each other and to work together to figure new things out.

In conclusion I think my group was able develop a structure that illuminated and unified the information.  We learned to work together and create a well designed document that also included well organized information.

The Objective was to take a stack of information, organize it, and put it together in a seamless book format as if it was done by one person.

As a group we achieved this through organization, delegation and using paragraph styles in InDesign. The first day we received the stack of information about pygmy goats. As a group we divided this up by topics and each group member was in charge of organizing the information within this topic. Because we labeled the paragraph styles the same, it made combining these documents much easier in the end. After we chose one design layout it was easy to copy these paragraph styles for everybody.

An important part of using paragraph styles is to only format the document through the paragraph styles. This is especially important for formatting information on the web.

One difficulty we faced was not having the same fonts as a group. If we were to do this again, it would be ideal if we had the InDesign book saved to a server and then we could all work on our own documents at the same time. This would cut down on the production time.

Overall this exercise was very informative on how we should organize information quickly for the user on a website. Even though five group members had their hands in the process, it was easy to make it look like one person did it because we learned how to use InDesign paragraph styles.

The organization and connections of different pages of information is an idea that is making more sense to me now.

It wasn’t easy to categorize information that was so disconnected from each other! We had to somehow draw a theme from them. Coming together in our ideas definately helped; we each had a new idea that the others had not thought of. I learned more how to cooperate in a group for a successful design, how to view a website as streams of organized material connected to each other, and to compile information into a book.

I appreciate doing the presentations as well. I want to feel comfortable doing that. I am glad we had a project that we were expected to do quick, so we could accomplish something right off the bat in this class. I feel it was successful.

Having built many websites for clients and businesses I had always approached them from a strictly functional standpoint. What code do we need to accomplish task X? What content does the client want and how to they want it organized?

Having gone through the Pygmy Goat exercise I have learned that information organization is the job of the designer. I had spent so much time making things “pretty” and functional that I had never thought to make them practical.

Working with my group really opened my eyes to the varying opinions on information structure and the multiple good solutions to a single problem. As a result of our discussion we ended up with a better document than I would have created on my own.

I now understand the important of organizing information into decipherable, logical order as well as working with a team to accomplish this task.

This project was interesting because it wasn’t about what the client specifically wanted. It was about how was the best way to organize the information that we were given.

Our group had a plan from the very beginning. We each took a specific topic like, raising goats or pygmy’s as pets, and we found all of the articles that applied to that topic. We removed the articles that had duplicates and really filtered the results. We paid close attention to what each article was talking about. After this we took our articles and came up with a theme using the h1-h6 style guide. It was interesting when we met back together because we all had a different vision of how we thought the article would look best. In the end we decided to combine a lot of our ideas. For instance, we used my fonts, Tony’s grid & margins, James’ cover page and Joe’s folios, etc. The finished product is really a combination of all of our ideas and I think it looks great! Once we decided on a layout we each contributed our articles. Joe put it into the book format (thanks!) and I printed the books at Alphagraphics.

We didn’t face many complications during this project but there were some to take note of. Intially we had issues on trying to decide spefically what the title’s of the topics should be named. It seemed like when we finally decided on a title, like for example, “Raising Pygmy Goats” there were articles that could apply but they could also be used in another area. It became vague in some areas. Then there were some articles that were so original that we only had one and we didn’t want to assign them a specific topic. We had to name and rename so that we could get the right amount of info for each area. Another thing that we had small issues with was understanding InDesign and putting all of our articles into a book format. Although the in-class demo helped tremendously, when we were in front of the computer screen, we had to use the help option often.  Those were just a few bumps along the way.

The things that I would change about our finished project are minimal but were obvious in the final execution. Some simple errors were made like the fact that we forgot to include a style sheet and that our presentation was short and we addressed the wrong issues. We focused too much on the design elements of this project and not enough on the issues of why we organized our information the way we did. In summary, this was a learning process. I learned a lot about typography architexture and heirachy in text. I realized that not matter the subject (pygmy goats), most things can be organized in a beautiful way. There were glitches along the way but I am pleased with how the final product turned out. I learned a lot and was impressed with my group members as we taught eachother along the way. I think our final product reperesents the hard work that we put into this first assignment.

So it seems to me that everyone else already knew about InDesign’s ability to generate a book that way. I however, was beforehand unawares of such features.

I knew about character and paragraph styles but I’ll now be able to go about printing tasks more efficiently. This assignment also started me thinking about focus groups and targeting demographics. Sure, we all went through and organized the information based on whatever type was put in front of us, but really WHO was it organized for? Bro. Franson, our other classmates or some mysterious other character still unknown to us that will forever remain in the shadows… I think that will serve everyone quite well to be thinking of that throughout our next assignment.

Spending group time outlining specific rules of procedure from document naming conventions to the necessary content everyone must create for the document will save lots of time in the end and smooth the process throughout the project.

When starting a new assignment I tend to get excited about it, and get ahead of myself. Unfortunately when working with a group this can cause a lot of wasted time & backtracking. This assignment was a great exercise in organizing and arranging content into a logical accessible order, but even more so it helped me realize how important organizing the group’s efforts rather than just diving into the assignment.

I thought a lot about the learning model’s emphasis on group work and why the university pushes it so hard. My feelings before were that group work was: hard, inefficient & unnecessary.  In past experience it has usually been easier for people to work separately and then put everything together in the end than to put forth the effort needed to work collaboratively throughout the project.

After this experience I decided that the learning model’s emphasis on group work isn’t there to annoy us, or make us force 5 people’s efforts together at the end but to learn how to synergize. The potential is there for a group to create something much greater than the just the sum of the individuals. It only takes a little more organization and effort from the get go to direct the group’s efforts. Learning and educating the group on the tools available so that everyone is up to speed allows everyone to focus on what matters on the assignment rather than spending so much effort making up for people going their own directions.

The first thing I’ve noticed about this assignment and about this class, is that it’s not just about how “pretty” something looks. You can have the best looking site in the world, but if the information is all over the place and doesn’t make any sense, then it’s a failure. I learned that organization and hierarchy are important keys to design.

The impression I got from the start of this assignment was we just organize a bunch information and make it look good, but as the assignment went on I found there was much more to it. Not only did we need to organize information, we also had to work with the fact that we were working with a bunch of people with different levels of experience and that each had their own vision of how the information should put together. We even had differences on how things should be categorized, such simple things like whether H1 is supposed to be h1. It’s just so easy look past the organizational part and go right for the coding and design parrts.

At the start of this assignment all I saw was a bunch of random information on an obscure topic such as pygmy goats. But by the end, I saw this book of easy to read information that looked good, and that I would actually want to pick up and read if had no idea about pygmy goats. It showed that no matter how good your designs look, people won’t want to look at it if it’s all just a random pile of information. I also found out that that it’s one thing to have a group project, but it’s quite another when you have a short amount of time, everyone is basically working on their own, and that you need to make the end result look like it was done by only one person. I thought this was a real world situation that we will all be in one day, and I’m glad that I will be somewhat prepared for it.