Saturday: User Design Overview Techniques w/ Chris Nodder

https://www.lynda.com/User-Experience-tutorials/UX-Design-Techniques-Overview/490750-2.html

This is a series on Lynda.com that explains a set of techniques that artists can use to make their development processes more user-centred such as gathering and analysing user data, creating personas and how scenarios and story boarding can help fill in design gaps. How getting early validation of your design by using paper prototypes can save a lot of time in the long run, the feedback and data that is received about these prototypes can then be used to better plan your development cycle.

Understanding the benefits of user-centred design

The key principle of user-centred design is that you gather data from users and then incorporate your findings into your design. By doing this you will be more likely to meet their true needs, which means they may like your design more and use it more efficiently. However it is often hard to incorporate users feelings and frustrations into a design that is systematic, which also makes it hard for your team to build designs that incorporate their needs. Teams often with experts in their domain often have great understanding of technology, with  a systematic approach to thinking about the world. While users tend to not be experts in software design and how technology works but know how they want to software to perform to suit their needs. This is where the you should apply user-centred design to translate the wants and needs of end users into specifications to solve technological problems.

This data which is collected about users can be used to identify pain points and to create personas. The pain points and personas are used during the ideation phase to create multiple possible solutions. Scenarios and storyboards then take these multiple possible solutions and narrow them down to a working set. From that, you build prototypes that can test the usability of your design. This pipeline allows your to follow the trail all the way back to the beginning, to the data you first collected and the initial observations that were made. 

User design is a team role and even if you’re a UX (user experience) specialist on a team the real benefits of user design only happen when multiple people are involved. Doing design work in isolation and then passing the work to a developer is never a good solution. Get everybody to test your product from development to marketing teams. This is because this is the only way to achieve a truly user-centred product, which is based around different personas and users as each person is going to use the design differently.Though your team may be worried about this being the best use of their time, investing time in the beginning saves a lot of time later on during development. When working in larger groups this means everyone on the team has the same background and agrees on the product's goals and plan, it's easier to communicate ideas and discuss changes. Everyone can refer back to the same experiences interacting with users when they're designing the user experience. That means that the whole team shares a common understanding of user needs and uses the same vocabulary to describe problems and potential solutions.This way less time is wasted in getting people up to speed or trying to describe why design took the direction it did, because it can all be visually seen in the data trail. 

Technique One: Analysing User Data

Without a good set of initial data, there is no way you can do user centred design. Unless you know who you are designing solutions for and what their problems are with the current way they complete their tasks, you won’t be able to design a better or more efficient way of achieving tasks. The best place to gather user data is in the place where users do the tasks you care about. Visit sites, observe users and note down useful data without leading your participants astray. Once you have identified the pain points, you’re in a position to design a solution that will benefit the user and aid them in completing their tasks and make them feel much happier while doing so.

Technique Two: Creating Personas

Personas are imaginary yet realistic and detailed descriptions of the users of your product or design. They provide a basis for design discussions by concentrating many pieces of user data into key focused, believable descriptions of your primary audience. Creating personas gives the team a short hand way of describing who they are building their design for. Rather than saying ‘the user’, which could mean anyone, they focus on some set characters with specific attributes. This means the design development takes those personas’ needs into account. This also allows the whole team to know who they are designing for, which will allow you to work more efficiently in a group as everybody will be on the same page.

By creating a specific personas you make the concept of ‘the user’ concrete rather than elastic, that way the whole team is developing for common set of user attributes, which leads to creating a more consistent interface and design. Even if the personas you create are different from your audience, the users will much prefer a consistent interface rather than an inconsistent one. 

Technique Three:  Understanding Ideation 

Ideation techniques are tools you use to make sure you are designing the best possible solution, not one that seems good enough. Ideation tools work by freeing up team members to be creating, removing the normal constraints that are put in place around development projects. Even when we apply the constraints later, the act of thinking broadly about the problem leads to better solutions. These solutions are more likely to be truly beneficial to users rather than just being the best you can do by following the current design. 

Ideation is essential for getting input and agreement from the whole team.For teams of software developers, the technique has several benefits. Everyone on the team can propose new ideas regardless of their graphical skills. The group moves from individual ideas to consensus. People gain understanding of why certain ideas may or may not work. And everyone feels like they were involved in design decisions. That feeling of investment in the UI will ensure that the whole team cares deeply about future design and usability work.

Technique Four: Working With Scenarios and Storyboards

If ideation is about removing barriers for creativity then scenarios and storyboards are the things that put the guide rails back in place and ensure that the solutions you design would actually be buildable by your team and desirable for your users. Scenario writing allows you to describe an ideal future, where you users can achieve their goals without trouble or problems they may face with the current design. What makes scenarios achievable is that you include the mechanism by which these users can achieve their goals and outcomes. 

Describing how you expect users to be able to complete their task is the first step to being able to develop a software solution to the problems you identifies in your data. Storyboarding allows you to create a visual representation of the scenario, so that you can see how the interaction between users, the system and other individuals works. Storyboarding is used extensively in the movie industry to plan out scenes before their shot. In this design process we can use it to plan out interactions before we build them. 

Technique Five: Creating Paper Prototypes

The less cost you sink into a prototype, the less concern you will have about throwing it out and starting again if you got things wrong. A paper prototype is quick to create, easy to modify and still allows you to test the interface concepts that you care most about.  You can run usability tests using just your paper prototype. This lets you verify your design by checking that the task flows properly and both the user and team members understand your design concepts.

Because the prototypes does not look finished, participants tend to give more honest and useful feedback. They are also happy if you make changes to the prototype within the session to incorporate their suggestions. You will get better, more honest and more actionable feedback from a thrown together paper prototype than you would from creating a mock up on a real device. A paper prototype allows you to learn a lot about the viability of your proposed design without ever writing a line of code. The cost savings associated with avoiding rework caused by these mistakes will pay for your minimal investment and user centred design many times over.

Technique Six: Implementation Planning

User experience design is useful in its own right for getting the team to understand how to design for customers rather than themselves. However, its true value is driving the development process by helping the team create an implementation plan. The way that it does this is through mapping out the different capabilities that will be needed in order to build a real product from the paper prototype that you created and usability tested. Because they have gone through all the stages of the user centred design process at this point, the team is well placed to prioritise capabilities and see the relationships between different items in the design. 

Tuesday:

Creating some custom business cards for myself, featuring my work.

Monday:

I’ve begun learning jQuery through Codeacademy. I’m finding it a lot harder than HTML and CSS because it doesn’t feel like a natural language. Where as HTML and CSS are somewhat readable in English, jQuery feels to me disconnected from the English language and so I’m finding it hard to understand how to write code in the correct format.

Friday: 

Reflecting on my images with the elements of design.

Unity/Harmony:

There are many elements which are in close proximity of each other, the trees and mountains do not allow for any open spaces and are quite dense. Due to the image being a panopainting (panoramic) it does not read the same as a normal image, the majority of the image is balanced by the sky and the floor (which would be below your feet). The symmetry in the mountains aids in balancing the image and helps to draw your attention into the middle, where there is a city in the distance. This image could be improved by adding more foreground or other characters. 

Balance:

As mentioned previously the symmetry balances the image on each side however there are also elements of asymmetry within the mountains as there are different shapes and peaks on each side. There are no elements arranged in radial form in this image.

Scale and Proportion:

In these panoramic images, the scale is usually not correct to what you see, here the floor and sky and dominant in scale however these elements would also be below and above you when standing in the sphere.  Within the image it is the mountains which dominate the landscape creating a horizon line across the image.

Dominance/ Emphasis:

The foreground in this image is dominated by the floor, though this is mainly due to it being panoramic, when inside the panoramic image the floor is still a large area of the image. Further in the distance the horizon is dominated by the large mountains, the city in the background gives emphasis to how large they really are. 

Similarity and Contrast:

As the background gets further away it also gets lighter creating an emphasis on the distance, this also lets the viewer know how much distance there is between us and the city. The image as whole is quite cool toned with the mountains being blue and the trees being green. This contrasts with the smaller elements of orange within the city.

Unity/Harmony:

The two rocks in the foreground create harmony because they are so similar, it balances the image and aids the focus on the city which is right in front of the viewer however this also makes the image feel claustrophobic and there are so many elements which are right in front of you. I struggled when creating this image to create a sense of depth and by adding in elements in the foreground it helps to make the image come alive as now the background and foreground elements are balanced.

Balance:

The image is asymmetrical with the begin two different mountains in the background, one with now and one without. However there are also elements in the image which do balance it out such as the two pockets either side of the city which create a sense of depth as well as the rocks in the foreground which I mentioned before.

Scale and Proportion:

In this image much like the one before the grass and sky take up the majority of the image. The scale of the mountains aid in giving a sense of scale to the city and how large it is. I struggled with getting the proportion right on the city because mountains are subjective. I needed elements in the foreground which the viewer would be able to identity as being large so that they were able understand that the city in the mid-ground was large but smaller than the mountains but but still large when compared to the rocks in the foreground. 

Dominance/ Emphasis:

The dominating elements in this image is the city and mountains each side of it. The city dominates the horizon line and the mountains beside it aid in drawing your attention down to the city, in a V shape. There is also dominance in the rocks in the foreground which also channels the viewers eye directly at the city. Putting all the emphasis on the city gives a sense of direction to the piece.

Similarity and Contrast:

The contrast between the green grass and the blue sky create a very vibrant image. I struggled with creating a sense of depth within this image even though I tried to push the mountains backwards by losing some of the saturation. There are also elements which have similarity, the blue is carried from the sky into the mountains which I’m not sure was a wise decision on reflection. I feel as though this image could of been made better if the mountains were less saturated, this may also help with the depth.

Unity/Harmony:

This image has harmony because it has repeating elements, a lot of the rock textures are the same but I’ve included other elements such as trees, rocks faces and sand to mix up the landscape and create valleys and curvature. This creates harmony because it looks cohesive as a piece and the elements that I have used work in unity with each other. 

Balance:

The image is asymmetrical because each side of the valley is different, though it has a lot of repeating elements I wanted to create two very different cliffs on each side so that the image was interesting while looking in all directions. By doing this it creates a natural focal point within the valley, which also leads the eye to the horizon line. 

Scale and Proportion:

Mountains are subjective and on their own it is hard to gauge a sense of scale. By adding in elements such as the plants in the foreground and trees in the valley it gives the viewer something to compare them to that they are familiar with making the piece look in proportion and to scale.

Dominance/ Emphasis:

The horizon is dominated by the blue hue which I added in to create an atmospheric effect however I don’t believe this worked effectively. Instead of creating an atmosphere, it puts emphasis on the horizon where the mountains looks faded, though this helps with depth it wasn’t the lighting effect I was hoping for. The mid ground is dominated by the valley below, which leads the eye to the horizon line where the mountains dip into a V. All these elements put emphasis on the horizon which is what I wanted in the composition.

Similarity and Contrast:

The contrast between the cool toned sky and the warm toned environment help to reinforce the horizon line, which is where I wanted the focal point to be. There are similar element throughout the image, repeated trees, bushes and cliffs create a cohesive environment. I did have to change a lot of the hues and saturation in images that I used to try and make everything similar.

Unity/Harmony:

There are lots of elements in this image which are in close proximity to each other such as the mountains, thought it does not make this piece feel catastrophic it does aid in creating a natural horizon line, much like my other images. The range of elements in the background and foreground help to bring harmony to this image, creating a multi-layered piece with lots of depth.

Balance:

In this piece I tried to create balance with asymmetric, though the image ihas got symmetrical elements, I moved a lot of the elements towards the left side. By doing this I created thirds so that the image was more interesting to look at and urged the viewer to move around to find the focal point rather than it being directly in front of them.  

Scale and Proportion:

Much like my other pieces, this piece to includes mountains however in this piece I created more space between them, so that there is space for elements to give scale and proportion. Trees in the foreground and background help to give a sense of distance, as they are getting smaller the further away they are. 

Dominance/ Emphasis:

The dominating element in this image is the hill in the background, it is not centred which draws your attention to the left side. By doing this, it will encourage interactivity within my piece, prompting the viewer t move to the left. This image does not have a city or structure within it, which is an element which I would now like to add because in reflection there is nothing to look at specifically, other than the environment. However there is also a beauty in just that, that the environment is the piece without any distractions because we often take our surroundings for granted. 

Similarity and Contrast:

I carried the colour pallet of my second image “City and Mountains” forward in this piece because I felt as though the contrast between the green and blue was beautiful however in that piece I struggled with depth. In this piece I feel as though I achieved a sense of depth quite well. This could be due to the lighter colour and saturation of the mountains in the background as well as elements in the foreground which help the viewer to realise the distance. 

Unity/Harmony:

In this piece there is both harmony and unity, creating a cohesive piece is key in it having these elements. I have done this in this image by matching the hue, saturation and darkness on the grass as well as the rocks. 

Balance:

In this piece I tried not to make it symmetrical, so changing elements and trying to make each side different was important to me. However I do not feel as though I have achieved this effectively because you can still see parts that are symmetrical, even if that’s not what I intended. The positive of it being symmetrical is that it is well balanced, this is due to elements such as the large rock in the mid-ground on the right and the rock in the foreground on the left, this also helps to create harmony.

Scale and Proportion:

The rocks in the foreground help to give a sense of scale to the environment, this is also done by the desaturation of the elements in the background. I believe this is one of my strongest pieces where I have successfully created a sense of depth. I believe the sky has also helped as the sky goes over the viewers head, instead of seeming flat. 

Dominance/ Emphasis:

The horizon in dominated by the sky, I wanted to create an environment which was extremely atmospheric and used all that had learnt from my other pieces and from my research on the Luminst movement. In this piece I really made the sky the dominant area, darkening the landscape to make the sky seem brighter and glow more.

Similarity and Contrast:

Thursady:

Evaluation:

I started off my creative practice wanting to create five portfolio-standard 2D environments based around five different themes. While I still created the five portfolio standard 2D environments, a lot changed in the direction of my project as a whole. I originally wanted to create environments which featured structures to tie the compositions together to create a cohesive project. However in the middle of the project I was not happy with the direction and outcomes that I was coming up with because it wasn’t a project that was close to my heart. I tried to make the project into a force for change by looking at advertising of poverty and how my work could be used to try and change that but it still didn’t light the fire for me. It wasn’t until I showed some work which was interesting me in a critique that I was asked “why don’t you do something like that?”. It made me think about what I truly enjoy and what I want to create to drive my project forward. I come from a fine art background and all work that I have made previously has been inspired by abstract artists or artists that use a lot of texture such as Fancis Bacon’s Head VI (1949).

 I always thought that fine art or art history didn’t have a place in concept art or games design but when I was asked “why not make something like that?” it made me stop and think, okay how can I do that? What movements are there that I can be inspired by to create better work and that are more relevant  to my work right now? That’s when I started to look at famous environment artists that painted the Americas in the 1800′s. I felt so inspired by their work, I love the textures that are in oil paintings, so that fulfilled that aspect that I was looking for, the colour palettes were beautiful and I can’t not mention their ability to render atmospheric lighting. So my project took a turn towards being more inspired by the works of the Luminist movement rather than including cities. I turned my project into a technical challenge by setting the goal to make five panoramic images instead of five 2D images because I felt that this would make up the difficulty I was loosing by not including the cities anymore. I also thought that it would be amazing to have these atmospheric environments that would be interactive, where the viewer could turn around and be within the environment, especially in an environment which was inspired by the Luminist movement. 

After mentioning to Sharon about my passion for the Luminst, Tonalist and Romanticism art movements we started to discuss the idea of arriving at this new land that hasn’t been discovered and painting it in same way these art movements do. Especially for the Luminist art movement, America had just been discovered and the natural beauty of it was translated into the paintings we see today. This is why the sky is often glowing and the colours are vibrant but soft, because it is meant to suggest a Godly, holy land that was pure. I wanted to convey the same emotions in my work however I don’t feel I was able to do this until my very last piece “Hills”. In my other works such as “City and Mountains” and “Valley” the colours are too saturated and the sky is not atmospheric enough however I feel as though I had to create an image like that to understand, it’s not what I want in a piece. It is still finished to a high standard but it wasn’t what I was aiming for as an end goal. I also tried other methods to achieve an aged effect by turning the sky into a green/blue hue as in my “Canyon” piece, though I feel this works because it looks vintage and hazy, it does not achieve the same results that can be seen in Luminist works. This is because I added in the green as a tint instead of considering the global lighting and tones of warm and cool which the Luminist are famous for. 

While I was trying to achieve a style of painting which drew inspiration from the Luminist’s I was also trying to overcome obstacles which I faced technically. I set myself the challenges of creating five panoramic images however I was trying every way to achieve a panoramic painting without sitting down and actually painting it and crafting it myself. I tried creating the distortion in Photoshop, I tried projecting it on the inside of a sphere, I tried running algorithms or even converting my image into an equirectangular projection. In the end I admitted defeat and sat down and got stuck in trying to create the equirectangular projection myself and I found my own workflow and now I can say that I can easily make a panoramic image. What I learnt from this is that it is important to  get stuck in and learn something that you’re uncomfortable with because the more you do it, the more you will learn how to do it unconsciously.

 I am also looking into moving forward with my project and being able to design environments in programs such as 3D Coat so that they can be viewed in VR. I have also taken a lot of inspiration from Noah Bradley's reference packs. I am aiming to take more high resolution photographs so that I can build my own reference bank to draw images from so that I do not have to rely on others references. I have also begun to engage with the art community more, posting my work on forums such as “Level Up!” and “Panopainting 360 VR” to gain feedback on my work as well as online sites such as RoundMe. I have also posted it on more professional sites such as Artstation and my LinkedIn profile so that my work is more accessible to those who want to view my work professionally. As I am learning to code at the moment I have not created a dedicated portfolio site because I want to code my own in the future so that I can show off my work as well as being able to say that I coded the website myself.

Thursday:

Uploading to online hosting sites for the QR codes URLS.

QR Codes link to Artstation *

https://roundme.com/tour/135577/edit/342262/

https://roundme.com/tour/153584/edit/388003/

https://roundme.com/tour/153586/edit/388005/

https://roundme.com/tour/153589/edit/388012/

https://roundme.com/tour/153592/edit/388015/

Wednesday:

Again using images from Noah Bradley’s royalty free asset pack to create this atmospheric hill landscape largely inspired by the Luminist movement. 

Tuesday:

Rebellion: Oxford

GUI/UX designer

Easy ways to find game studios in your area:

https://www.gamedevmap.com/

https://gamesmap.uk/#/companies

Tuesday:

I’ve got quite a good technique now. I make a smaller image that is 3000 (w) x 432 (h) this is so that the width is already there and then I can scale up the height where the pinch points will be (at the images need to be 2:1 to work on most websites). This also means I can create a landscape without worrying about the distortion on the top or bottom, then when I scale it up I can create foreground and the place where you’ll be able to see the floor/ground.

Painting in the floor, as you can see it gets a little blurry at the pinch point. 

Tuesday:

Reflecting on my learning agreement.

Proposal: What do you intend to do?

Creative project:

My project is going to consist of making five portfolio-standard 2D environments based around five different themes. This project is about designing dynamic environments using man made structures to tie the compositions together to create a cohesive project. To achieve this I will be using static designs of skyscrapers and adjust the environment to reflect a target culture or genre.

I’m going to explore different processes and techniques by researching artists and their workflows, I will then critique and evaluate their work according to the elements/ principles of design, I  will experiment with these processes to create a collection of finished portfolio pieces which will display a range of different techniques such as blocking out, thumbnails and interactive panoramic paintings.

Themes:

The constant element will be skyscrapers, the theme is constant change, as such I will not be picking a genre, as when I am producing work I want to be able to freely move between genres. I will be referencing places such as Rio De Janeiro, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai to see how the division of rich and poor settlements co-exist in the cityscape. I see many city concepts which are based around genres such as Sci-Fi and fantasy but I am interested in creating city concepts where these genres mix. I can use class divides as a theme to create city concepts where these styles co-exist with each other to exaggerate the theme. I will be looking into cities which have drastically different development in some areas in a small space of time and how it affects the personality and aesthetic of the city and then translate this into a class divide using different genres.

Critical reflection:

When I originally drafted my proposal I didn’t know what I wanted to do for my project, I knew I wanted to create environments however this didn't have enough direction behind it to guide me through the months. On reflection I haven’t created environments which reflect a target culture or genre but I do feel as though I have created environments which reflect on the beauty of the places that exist. Half way through my project I changed course because I wasn’t enjoying what I was creating. In one of the critiques I attended in the lecture theatre I shared some work that I was enjoying but I noted that It wasn’t relevant to my studies, to which my lecturers asked ‘why not?’. I think it was a perfect question to ask, and It really got me thinking about what I wanted to create. I love environments and I really wanted to create texture rich scenes that drew from the Luminist movement in America in the 1800′s.

Monday:

High-resolution images can be found here:

http://meshkahful.tumblr.com/post/160709978596

With amended meta data:

Sunday:

Creative Assembly:  Horsham, West Sussex.

Trainee Cinematic and Marketing Artist

Jagex: Cambridge, West Suffolk

Junior UI Artists (Graphic Design)

Sunday:

High-resolution images can be found here:

http://meshkahful.tumblr.com/post/160709978596

Friday:

I really love creating this images because it feels as though I’m creating an immersive environment for somebody to actually stand in and be there. Here I’m creating another image from Noah Bradley’s royalty free images. I’m trying another brighter image because I actually quite like the contact between the blue sky and the lush green lands. Though one of my other images didn’t work as well as I wanted it to, I feel as though this one may work better and I think this is due to the perspective and landscape. In my other image everything was close to the person which didn’t help with the sense of scale. In this image I tried to push everything backwards and away from the viewer. It also helps to layer the image as you would traditionally, putting elements into the backgound, middle-ground and foreground. 

Check this link for high-resolution images:

http://meshkahful.tumblr.com/post/160695199346

Wednesday:

From my research I tried experimenting with different hues, tints and colour overlays to try and create an aged look. I feel like this worked in some aspects but didn’t work in other aspects. I love the colours in the sky and where it meets the mountains at the bottom because it reminds me of Polaroid pictures. However that was not what I wanted it to look like as a whole. I want it to look like the artists which I researched before, artists such as Bierstadt, Cole or Turner. The problems I faced here was that though I can turn the sky a blue/green tint, that doesn’t effect the rest of the lighting. If I’m going to try and paint an image like these Luminist painters then it needs to be much darker with atmospheric lighting which happens around sunrise/sunset. 

Check this link for high-resolution images:

http://meshkahful.tumblr.com/post/160695287436

Below is a screenshot of when I paint the floor, this the method I spoke about in my last post. Where you can paste in a texture and merge it down. Alternatively you can also paint in the sphere, which will eliminate all distortion.

I found myself using textures and blending and merging them, however when I did this within the sphere the textures would be extremely low quality, as if they lost resolution or were just blurry. To fix this I opened the image diffuse layer and painting in the texture again, being aware of where it has distorted. I also try not to put too much towards the bottom or top of the image to avoid the pinch points, however It would be good if I tried to paint in a sky which goes overhead.  

Each time I want to upload it online, I have to amend the meta data in the image. When you take a photo on your phone it places information inside that image which will tell computers or websites what camera it was, what ISO setting it was and what aperture it was. It also give information such as whether or not it was a panoramic image. It is this information that I have to change when uploading it online because it is this data which will tell the website to make it panoramic. So at the end of each image, I have to change the meta data inside the image to tell the place where I upload it to change it to a panoramic image for me. This is also why it wouldn’t work when creating an image inside a sphere. These websites such as artstation, facebook and other sites specifically use the equirectangular projection and will only upload an image when it is in this format.