#research5

Another thing I have taken from the critique was the idea of an onboarding or tutorial process. I want to exercise and design this now so I know how to implement this for the exhibition prototype. I wanted to integrate both instructional cards and also interactive tutorials, with the incentive of having ‘progress’ in the app and listing out tasks users can complete.

According to Tubik Studio (2017), tutorials are able to boost engagement and show the most beneficial sides of a system to the user. Babich (2017) recommends using visuals along side an interactive tour which are triggered when the user reaches an appropriate section in the app.

Wireframe/user flow

Ui design

References:

An interesting thought that I came across during the crit session was to think about users when displaying things they might not want to see. Facebook has a similar problem with their ‘on this day’ feature. They have tried to get around this by using algorithms and relying on users to personalise the kind of information they want to reflect on (Weinberger, 2017).

According to Lau, White,& Schnall (2013), we experience things with the goal of happiness in mind. Eg, we go on holiday to experience positive emotions. Newman (2016), discusses how thinking of times when we have overcome challenge allows us to increase our self esteem and motivation. However, over thinking about the happy memories gets rid of the mystique and lessens our positive experience of that memory (Lyubomirsky, Sousa, & Dickerhoof, 2006).

With my app, I dont want users going away and feeling horrible or bad, and I want users to be able to look at happy times too. To get around this, I want to allow personalisation, and not put in little details that may get rid of the thrill and the mystique around happy moments. Doing this, alongside displaying the information in a different way. There is also a section to explain to users about the importance of reflection.

Wireframe/User flow

Ui Design

(I also have moved the night mode button to somewhere much more accessible.)

According to Caldeira, & et al., (2017), most of the apps that they have looked at lack support for the preparation and action stages for analysing moods. Preparing users include explaining how to track mood, and the action stage mostly refers to recommendations users get based on their personalised data. (The other two stages are Collection of data, and reflection, in terms of the visualisation of the data gathered.) 

Another feature they found that was missing in apps were the ability to look through all the data easily and filter through them.

For the stats page, I followed the four main stages that Caldeira, et al. (2017) had followed:

Preparation - instructing users about tracking (how and why), and how beneficial it could be.

Collection - the interface for collecting the moods

Reflection - visualisation for the mood data

Action - further actions users can take based on their moods.

The two stages I coincidentally need to work on are the Preparation and the action stages.

Wireframe & Userflow

Stats Screens

References:

Caldeira, C., Chen, Y., Chan, L., Pham, V., Chen, Y., & Zheng, K. (2017). Mobile apps for mood tracking: an analysis of features and user reviews. AMIA Annu Symp Proc, 2017, 495–504.

I started off with sketching the 12 main moods for the UI. It has the same line icon style as the rest of the UI. I tried to explore different eyes and mouth placement on the face, eye shape, and mouth shape:

Basic wireframe:

I decided not to opt for the scale like before, as having 12 moods on a <370px scale doesn’t seem very usable. There’s also no way for users to choose two moods at once.

Ui design:

According to Braniecka, Trzebińska, Dowgiert & Wytykowska (2014) experiencing opposing emotions is a sign of tension. People are unable to cope with these emotions, and analysing those can help motivate people. Seltzer (2014) states that people can phsyically feel two moods, but ultimately people can boil that down to one.

To prepare for users that feel opposing emotions, I plan to merge the Circumplex model and the Plutchik wheel to get a secondary emotion to help users cope with how they feel.

I decided to boil it down to 12 moods, and I thought about secondary emotions that might come up when users can’t think of just using one mood.

Emotions based on the purple text boxes are based from Plutchik’s wheel of emotions.

Here are the details:

There are some emotions that are a result of the same primary moods, usually the results are opposite emotions.

References:

Moods are very subjective and psychologists and scientists have often disagreed with quantifying something like moods.

According to Desmet, P. M. A., Vastenburg, M. H., & Romero, N. (2016, p. 245) emotions have a more specific and targeted focus compared to moods. Moods last longer and are often low intensity. In summary, moods last longer, and are diluted versions of emotions.

Different ways to scale and quantify moods

BMIS (Mayer, J. D., & Gaschke, Y. N.,1988)

Mood experience is made up of two elements: the direct experience of the mood, and the meta-level of experience. The BMIS helps to put those two elements together for reflective purposes.

POMS (Profile of Mood States) (Carmichael, A., 2012).

This test consists of 65 emotion adjectives that are related on a scale. The 7 dimensions are:

Anger-Hostility

Confusion-Bewilderment

Depression-Dejection

Fatigue-Inertia

Tension-Anxiety

Vigor-Activity

Friendliness

Only qualified psychological professionals can access the full test.

Plutchik Scale (Hokuma, 2017)

There are eight primary emotions on the wheel, grouped by opposites. Adding up various primary emotions will produce new ones.

Circumplex Model (Carmichael, A., 2012).

This model does not agree with positive and negative moods being direct opposite. 

References:

30/11/16

Andrea Dabene - Artist Research

Andrea Dabene is a French photographer but was born in Austin, Texas. She loves travelling and a lot of her photography is directly inspired by the nature she encounters on her travels. She does equal parts of landscape, scenic photography and up close, portrait photography. This appeals to me because I also like to experiment with both landscape and portrait photography. She also uses a lot of different subject matter in her photography, her main focus is usually scenery and nature, vast bodies of water or forests and leaves but sometimes she does more photos of people and individual objects.

Andrea takes a lot of her photography while she is travelling, this means a lot of her photos are very brightly lit and the natural outdoors sunlight. The main technique she uses for creating dark spaces is taking her images from inside a space such as the back of a car or from inside a tent and exposes for the light outside to almost create a frame around the images. It is a very effective way of drawing the eye of the viewer to the centre of the images.

In a lot of her portrait photos of people she has the subject ‘s face covered which gives off a very abstract look which I like because I find that sometimes regular portraiture can be an awkward experience at times so having the subjects face covered by the hair or having them face the other way appeals to me. This technique also creates the illusion that the subject didn’t know the photo was being taken, this make the images seem more off the cuff and spontaneous rather than properly set up and structured portrait photo.

A lot of Dabene’s photos use the subject matter of reflections in water, this relates to my project as a lot of the images from my first two shoots focused on reflections in water. Using the reflections as the subject matter for her photography gives the images a bit more of an abstract look and makes for a very good creative tool to create much more interesting photos.

Nearing the end of the lecture I began to worry, nothing, in particular, had jumped out at me to the point where I was really intrigued and wanting to learn more. But as the slideshow came to a close one of the last slides reignited hope! The longest bridge in the world, could anything be more interesting than that?! So this week I decided that I wanted to research this bridge as well as other feats of engineering. 

After delving into the world of competitive bridge building I was amazed to see that China not only had the longest bridge in the world named the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge that stretched an amazing 164.8km long, but they also took the prize for the top three! Second was the Tianjin Grand Bridge at 113.7km and third is the Weinan Weihe Grand Bridge 79.7km (half the size of the colossal Danyang-Kunshan). 

This bridge was a particular triumph as it covers many areas of the land and sea. After 17 years of planning the bridge now stretches across the Yangtze River Delta and continues on to the open water of Yangcheng Lake in Suzhou, towering above both land and sea at an average of 31 metres off the ground. This bridge was not just an engineering triumph, it supported the communities throughout its four year 8.5 million dollar build, employing 10,000 people. The reason that this bridge was made was to half the journey time between Huang Dao, Qingdao Island and Qingdao. The bridge is earthquake proof for the on average 30,000 cars a day over 6 lanes that travel across it.  

This bridge as a creation sets Chinas designers out to be some of, if not the best in the world. These same designers, along with British engineers are now working on beating the record that they still hold, linking Hong Kong and Macau showing how persistent the Chinese are in bettering themselves and beating the expectations of others. 

Resources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danyang%E2%80%93Kunshan_Grand_Bridge

http://www.livescience.com/34448-worlds-longest-bridge.html