Assignment: Reflection

Challenge    I am a senior undergraduate student in Human-Computer Interaction class. It is a study

to understand the way people behave and feel towards computer or machine. Then, I’ve got  a term project to make use of data that were given by the professor. The data are transactions  of user’s using websites and their basic profile such as their duration, number of pages viewed,  income, region, household size, etc. From my point of view, it is difficult to consider what can  be done with the 21 columns and up to 300,000 rows of data. There is literally massive of  amount of combination of columns to make. At the end, I need to figure out “what to tell?”  because I need to give a presentation of this data.    Selection    The tools that seems to be appropriate at this moment is storytelling. It is a tool to

help connect a speaker and an audience together. An information that a speaker was trying  to share with the audience is depend on the audience itself. To know the audience is a key  to communicate better. That was a first rule of storytelling. I think if we know who the  audience are, I will be able to try to empathize them and know what they need to know from  this data. Then I will be able to communicate with my audience smoothly.

Since, I am studying in Human-Computer Interaction class, I think storytelling can

contribute to the rules of designing and improving user’s interface well because they both  involve thoughts about the users (audiences).    Application    I will explain how I used the storytelling tools to improve my term project. I used two

rules from it. Firstly, I use the first rule of storytelling which is “know your audience” or in this  case understand the users. I then think who the possible users are. I came up with 3 groups:  companies’ owner, their customer, their potential investors. All of it might need different kinds  of information since they may have different questions. So, I decide to do a little research of  what they need to know and their objectives.

After the I did, I built interactable visualizations on a website with personalization

features and recommendations that depends on the users’ type. At this point, I did not forget  to sequence the visualization. For example, for companies’ owner, after I analyze data, I found  a solution to a question they asked, “What can we do to increase a number user?”. I knew

that at this company, the number of their transaction in a product they have is not significantly  different from their competitors. The number that is quietly different is from other products  they don’t have. So, my suggestion is to expand the products line. I plan to start by asking  them the same question and then continue with a graph showing their sales transactions of  their single product as I explain it. After that, I added their competitor’s sales transaction in  this product. Finally, I added the amount of product of other’s transaction from other  companies to make them see the different and told my suggestion as an answer to the  question I asked in the beginning. If I show this simultaneously, it would be harder to explain.

Insight    After using the storytelling process, it leads to a new perspective of how I see the

problems. It is quietly useful to use with the design concept I’ve been learning: to know your  users/ to understand users. The visualizations I built are not one-size fit all problems. Thus,  things that I learnt from this is there are many users in the real world and their needs might  be different. In web-design, although they teach universal design, I believe if a personalization  page can be created, it will generate better communication.    Approach    This tool is really fit for web designer/developers. It can help to think about users

more. Then the web-designer can create a perfect personalized website or visualization for  their users depend on what they need. It is also useful to use in a presentation to help  communicating the complex idea such as strategy (stated in the video) because it helps to  sequence what to tell. I will totally use this as I am determined to be a wed designer in my  future.

