Fall 2015
Advanced Interaction Design
COGS 160
A7: Computing by the Inch, Foot, & Yard
As with A6, you'll submit a total of six mock-ups. Each should show the intended actual layout, with typefaces & colors. Please bring in print copies. Select two screens each for:
- INCH: a watch, 1.5" × 1.5" square.
- FOOT: Iterate one of your previous designs based on insights from studio. Your choice which one.
- YARD: a wall display, like the 'talks' display in the CSE lobby or the news displays by the elevators on the 2nd-6th floors of Atkinson Hall. 65" diagonal, 1920 px × 1080 px
(your choice whether it's horizontal or vertical)
Goals
Follow the criteria from A6. Also, create designs that work with the form factor. Don't think of a watch or wall interface as a normal 'web page'; really think about the tasks and design for that.
- Work extra hard to avoid clutter, like background-color changes. Make sure to use a grid.
- Low clutter doesn't mean no content. What information would be most useful to people? Show that.
- On a watch, you really get one nugget of information on a screen.
- The challange of a wall: people will walk by and may not interact with *anything*, so put your best foot forward. Think about zero-click interaction as the most common use case. Show real content, and make it exciting. But don't crowd it so much that nothing is legibile from a distance.
- Avoid redundant presentations. Show elements once.
- At the inch and the yard, a dark background often (though not always) works better than a white background. On a backlit watch or wall display, full-screen white can feel like a blinding light. When just the information is 'lit up', it's often easier to read. (Obviously white backgrounds often work great at the foot scale.)
- At the yard-scale, don't show private information. Save that for more personal scales.
- Make sure all the text is readable. If you're designing an inch-scale screen zoomed into foot-scale, you may get mislead. And if you're designing a wall that will be seen from 10 feet away, but you're 10 inches away, you'll also be misled.
- Both a watch and a wall are often location-specific interactions. Use location wisely.