DESIGN ASSIGNMENTS:
ACTIVITY DESIGN, FEEDBACK, USER IN CONTROL

THE VIRTUAL TOUR

Software - whether it's a website, a CD-ROM or something on a Palm - is about helping people DO things.

Therefore, good software design begins by considering and designing the things people are going do do with the software.

In other words, good design begins by designing activities.

Objective
Design the activities for a simple website.

The client, e-tours.com, sells actual tours. They specialize in creating customized tours for common-interest groups. Bird watchers, for example, or people interested in architecture.

E-tours is especially good at packaging activities that interest these groups into the travel itinerary. E-tours' audience is a web-savvy crowd of 35-60 year olds who have lots of disposable income and at least 4 weeks vacation per year.

E-Tours wants you to create a virtual-tour website for one of their tours. The purpose of the website is to sell seats in the real tour by giving users a sense of what they will experience on the real tour.

1. What is the common-interest group you wish to design for?
2. What's their destination? What's the tour called?
3. Brainstorm on the activities that your audience will engage in on the virtual tour. Put yourself in the mind of a typical person in the audience. What would they want to do if they were on this tour?
   • make a list of all these activities
   • evaluate your list and pick the best six activities (indicate which six you've chosen)
   • create a home page for the virtual tour; show how visitors will know what the activities are and how to navigate to each one
4. Put all your answers on your website.

THE NEW NEW PHONE

Interactive pieces are language. Each piece has its own language of interaction. In simplest form, that language is a set of verbs and nouns.

The verbs are the things you do.

The nouns are the things you see, hear, experience...

Objective
Learn how to design a piece by articulating its language of interaction and creating a table of verbs and nouns.

You've been hired by Sony to design the world's first web-based personal telephone answering machine.

The Specifications

Your machine needs to let users do the following activities:

• Turn power on/off
• Adjust volume
• Record and playback the outgoing message
• Playback, erase, skip the rest of a message, replay a message, and stop playback
• Display how many messages have been received
• During listening, show which message is being played

The Assignment

1. Develop a language of interaction based on the activities listed in the specifications. To help you do this, you may want to analyze the language of other answering machines.
2. Make a table (see below) that organizes your language.
   Be sure to group the verbs and nouns so.
   
   

   verbs	nouns
   on	power
   off	power

   
   
3. Try out your language on other people. Can they figure it out?
4. Once you have a language that works, recreate it in HTML and link to your website.

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