My first assignment during the course I’m attending at K3 has been this online course guide. It was asked to each group (3 persons) to think about new way of visualizing and searching databases. I worked on this concept with Fredrik Johnsson and Daniel Karlsson.
The concept is basically based on these assumptions:
- scenarios: the first thing we did was to draw some scenarios and identify the personas we were going to work with. When you are on K3 website is basically because you know what to do or because you do not. Simple, eh? These two scenarios were very useful for the problem setting and design phase (it was a week project and we wouldn’t have had the time to make researchs)
- the new interface had to appear friendly and integrated with the existing one: we thought that the interaction had to happen in the same virtual space, the existing website, remaining close to it
- keywords: using keywords and tags is a very good way to enhance your searches. We thought that having the possibility to choose between popular\useful keywords and to enter your own ones, woul have been a good way of simplifying interaction
- attraction: we started with several metaphors but, at the end, we focused on the magnet one. It works well if you make the user feel the attraction between keywords and results
- visualization: the main challenge was how to visualize so many informations about courses, programs and so on. We focused on the connections and the relations among the nodes. In this way, you can focus on a little part of the whole net, without losing important connections you want to know or you would like to have known (i.e. serendipty)
