sketch by susan

Oh hey, I’m working on things right now.

I love rounds. Round, round, round.

Hi everyone,

I will be migrating my sketchbook blog to Posterous soon. The subdomain which this used to operate will starting pointing there. 

However, all posts will be graciously auto-posted here as well. I will not let my few, but awesome, followers cold.

Now to go get my butt kicked by the pre-spring break crunch.
-Susan

I have beef with this “rate your teammates” assessment all team-based project courses employ. For awhile, I was being somewhat critical, and picking out one trait which my teammates can improve. No one is perfect, so it seemed like the right? thing to do.

However, once you factor in grades, I saw that giving anyone a less than 5/5 score hurts their grades. That’s unpleasant. So how do we solve this? By going down the 5 (out of 5) and giving everyone a 5 in every category.

The better solution is to perhaps facilitate a means of giving direct feedback to each other, in person not in survey, if there so happens to be suggestions. And, if our professors want, we can keep the survey too. After all, straight 5s feel good to have!

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Disclaimer: This opinion is specific to the teams I’ve experienced starting from college. My feelings about high school teams are VERY different.

Cubes, paddle-wheels, rotating axis. Hairy lines. Have about 30 or so pages full of this. One day, I’ll show you.

It involves chasing or avoiding cupcakes.

A little bit to show I am not dead yet. This is seriously the hardest I’ve worked, consistently, during one given semester.

Only 2 more weeks, and a day, until our spring break!

Well, that depends: the right design depends on the context. But, for an in class presentation, where we are sharing with peers and faculty, I believe a more storyboard, humorous approach is the way to go.

I’ll save the black-on-white document styling for the stakeholders.

Everyone in class had to write one notecard’s worth of feedback per team. The mandatory factor made everyone a little bit more attentive, though it was obvious that some people were disinterested.

What I found interesting is that the feedback was truly a mixed bag.

For example, one of the things I tried out was BIG text. Heard loud and clear, the big text was a success. And, everyone can read it.

Text as motion was also well received. On a side note, admitting that we didn’t really know what to do at first was a good decision. Somewhat risky, but making the audience chuckle does wonders.

Though, one of the repeating critiques said that the remnants of the previous slide were distracting. The intent was that they’d build to simulate motion as well as work as reminders of the context.

Also, another strategy I tried using was employing as little text explanation as possible, making the presenters the main focus while explaining. I am lucky to be paired with some truly strong presenters, so we delivered.
On the other hand, some were bothered by the lack of bulleted main points. It is conventional, and comforting, to have those at hand I suppose.

Okay, I had to agree on a kerning choice comment: it’s cheesy. It was late and seemed like a clever idea at the time. Out of those who commented on this kerning choice, there was a halfway split between love it and hate it. So, even if I had agreed that this was the lesser choice, there were those on the other side!

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Overall, we had one person say the palette was reminiscent of the “blue screen of death” while others were bothered by the lack of formalism (logos in the footer, date of last revision, team name on all slides, etc.)
But, I assure you both of these did not happen because of conscious decisions, and not because I/we were careless.

Ultimately, this is pushback was very similar to that I’ve received in “the real world.”

As a designer, you need to learn how to effectively integrate feedback. And, somewhat unfortunately, it all comes down to the phrase you might be tired of hearing: it depends.
But at the same time, it’s that openness and freedom that makes me enjoy the design experience.

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Credit where credit’s due: I took a ton of inspiration from NoteandPoint.com while making this. I can’t wait to try another approach for our next presentation. Seriously, these are fun to make. I just wish I could deliver them as well as I could in my head!

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This was just a little peak into what I’ve been up to for the MHCI Capstone Project.

P.S. I prefer not to post the entire presentation. However, if you are an employer, I’d be happy to show it off to you during an interview ;)