Week 10 - by Lee Chen Yau

Physical Design : Getting Concentrate
Design is about making choices and decisions. Physical interface of interactive product should not conflict with the user's cognitive process which involved in achieving the task.

Example : Designing for different culture
Some guidelines to help with international design
- Be careful about using images that depict hand gestures or people, such as "thumbs-up", "moutza", "A-OK", the "Corna".
- Use a generic icon.
- Choose color that are not associated with national flags or political movements.
- Ensure that the products support different calendars, date formats and time formats, number formats, currencies, weights and measurement systems.
- Ensure the size of international paper, envelope sizes and address format.
- Avoid integrating text in graphics as they cannot be translated easily and allow for text expansion when translated from English.

Using Scenarios in Design
Scenarios can be used to explicate existing work situation but are more commonly used for expressing proposed or imagined situations to help in conceptual design. There are four roles for scenarios:
- A basic for the overall design
- For technical implementation
- As a means of cooperation within design teams
- As a means of cooperation across professional boundaries such as in a multidisciplinary team.

Using Prototypes in Design
Generating storyboards from scenarios:
- A storyboard  represents a sequence of actions or events that the user and the system go through to achieve a task
-  A scenario is one story about how a product may be used to achieve a task.
- How?
   * Break the scenario into a series of steps which focus on interaction
   * Then create one scene in the storyboard for each step

Tool support
- Tools to support prototyping through sketching tools, environments to support icon and menu design, widget libraries and so on.
- User interface software tools support developers by reducing the amount of code that has to be written to implement elements of the user interface such as windows, widgets, and to tie them all together.