Now finally, we come to the last part of this module.
1. What application are we going to build in our final project?
Basically, we are going to build a online Ebook reader. Our application will be different from others because we will provide cross platform support and history synchronizing. Like other normal Ebooks reader on iOS device or android phones, this application will provide a similar UI to help the users to read the books. What's more, we will synchronize the reading history and bookmarks to the server. Hence, even the users restore their system or changing devices, they could still continue with their readings.
2. Problems we are going to solve.
1) How to make it easy for user to find their interesting books?
I am not sure whether it is my biased opinion or not. I did not like iBook because I need to download the books to my laptop and then transfer to iBook. It is a two-step procedure. It is a bit troublesome to me. What I prefer is providing me a list of books and letting me pick the one I am interested in. Admittedly for some of books, we can not provide in the server. Hence the user can not user our application and they need to transfer to iBook instead. However, it is not quite my concern. Once the user could upload their txt file to our server, the problem will be solved. Currently, we will only support for txt and epub files.
2) Data synchronization
Our application is different from most of other similar apps because we have the feature of data synchronization. We could ensure that the data will not be lost and you could easily transfer to other devices.
3. Challenges
1) How to fit in different screen sizes?
It is a quite nasty problem. It causes many problems to our UI designers. We intend to have different CSSs to solve this issue. But we still could foresee that there are many small details we need to handle in future.
2) How to pick the content to display?
We want to make our UI similar to native Ebook readers. It leads some problems to us. Because of the screen size could be different, for each page, the content going to be displayed will be different. And how to remember the history is also a problem. (We could not use the page number to record, because page number will vary from different screen sizes) Hence we did some string manipulation and try to get the suitable content to the given screen size. However, up to now, the result was not so appealing. We may need to do more manual adjustment in order to achieve a better display
That's basically what we are going to do in the final project. Hope everything will go well.
Oct 18, 2011
Make Up: Review of Assignment 2
For Assignment 2, to be honest, I did not do a lot of coding. I work more on the css and some of the UI designs.
From the feedback, it is quite clear that it was not a good UI design. Many bugs are found and many details are ignored.
How to improve the UI design in future?
1. Choose the most suitable design, not the most attractive design.
While designing for the UI, we try to find the most nice-looking pictures to be the background image as well as the button images. However, it seems that these nice images have nothing to do with our application. Before reading the feedback, I think that a good UI design should try to attract the attention of the users. It was not a wrong idea, but I ignored one basic and fundamental fact. The design should be at least relevant to the application. It should provide some information for the users to know more about the the application. It is not just a simple picture. Hence, I should not choose the picture which looks nice but irrelevant. Even the looking of the website was very normal, as long as it could help the user to understand the application, it is a good design already. Hence next time, I will pay more attention on the relevance than the looking.
2. Details ignored
Admittedly, after reading the feedback, I realized that some of our UI designs may not be so suitable for the users. However, it is quite difficult for us to detect these small points when we are coding for the project. After coding for several days, most of the coders will be quite familiar with the UI design. Hence, even when I try out the application, I did not realize that we missed some details. Even though some of the details we have considered several times, it turns out that the users still do not like it. For me, in order to solve this problem, we could improve on 2 parts. First, we need to pay more attention on the details. Secondly, we really need to have test users (who has no previous knowledge about our applications) to try out and give us suggestions.
To conclude, next time, I will try to have a better design. But luckily, I will not be a UI designer for our final project.
From the feedback, it is quite clear that it was not a good UI design. Many bugs are found and many details are ignored.
How to improve the UI design in future?
1. Choose the most suitable design, not the most attractive design.
While designing for the UI, we try to find the most nice-looking pictures to be the background image as well as the button images. However, it seems that these nice images have nothing to do with our application. Before reading the feedback, I think that a good UI design should try to attract the attention of the users. It was not a wrong idea, but I ignored one basic and fundamental fact. The design should be at least relevant to the application. It should provide some information for the users to know more about the the application. It is not just a simple picture. Hence, I should not choose the picture which looks nice but irrelevant. Even the looking of the website was very normal, as long as it could help the user to understand the application, it is a good design already. Hence next time, I will pay more attention on the relevance than the looking.
2. Details ignored
Admittedly, after reading the feedback, I realized that some of our UI designs may not be so suitable for the users. However, it is quite difficult for us to detect these small points when we are coding for the project. After coding for several days, most of the coders will be quite familiar with the UI design. Hence, even when I try out the application, I did not realize that we missed some details. Even though some of the details we have considered several times, it turns out that the users still do not like it. For me, in order to solve this problem, we could improve on 2 parts. First, we need to pay more attention on the details. Secondly, we really need to have test users (who has no previous knowledge about our applications) to try out and give us suggestions.
To conclude, next time, I will try to have a better design. But luckily, I will not be a UI designer for our final project.
Make Up: Case Study
How to design a better UI?
It is always the question I asked myself since last semester.
However, even after the seminar today, I still can not have a good and clear ideas. What I learn, I will say that these are some clues for you to get a better UI design.
How to design a better UI?
Before I really could design a better UI, the key subject is that I need to understand what people like and what is convenience and what is beauty.
1) What people like?
It seems to be an easy question. However, everyone will give a different result. It is unlikely to make everyone happy in the end. Hence we need to give up some of the users. From my perspective, we need to more focused on the general users. The best method is to have a statistical survey and get the general result from the survey. However, the problem is that sometimes people do not know what they like at all. It seems that everything is good to them, equivalent to say that every design is bad. Hence sometimes, the survey result may not be accurate and correct. That's why we need to learn more from general people. I remember that a lecturer mentioned that a general person is the most random person you will pick on the street during one of my law lectures. Equivalent to say that, the general user for our application is the most random user we pick from all our users. Then apply our common sense to analyze what he/she likes....
2) what is convenience?
In fact, this is also a trouble question to solve. From the high sales of apple products, we know that apple products will have a good design and most of the users said that i-series is convenient, which means the UX is good. How did apple product achieve such goal? I believe that they really have a very deep study on what people like and then try to come up with the most convenient design. They pay attention to every details of the product. That is the only way to come up with the most convenient design.
3) What is beauty?
In order to come up with the best looking UI design, of course we need to understand what is beauty. On the flight to Singapore several months ago, I met a professor from Architecture Department, Tongji University. I asked him what is beauty and how to understand beauty. He told me that it will be a long learning journey. I need to learn from the history and try to have more chances to view masterpieces. What's more, I need to pay more attention on daily life. For example, during the seminar, it is very clear that the lady dress up very nicely. In fact she tried to dress up with her own style. When she came to give the presentation, from what she wears, we already know that she is a good designer. If she can not make herself look beautiful, how could she come up with a nice UI design? Hence in order to learn beauty, start from now and start from self... (For girls, just try to make yourself have your own style. Starting form yourself does not mean to do a lot of makeups and wear expensive dresses. Starting from yourself means finding out the best clothes that will show your personalities. Be yourself. That is beautiful)
To conclude, up to now, I am still not a good designer. Need more time to learn and practice. After a long time, maybe I will be a good designer...
It is always the question I asked myself since last semester.
However, even after the seminar today, I still can not have a good and clear ideas. What I learn, I will say that these are some clues for you to get a better UI design.
How to design a better UI?
Before I really could design a better UI, the key subject is that I need to understand what people like and what is convenience and what is beauty.
1) What people like?
It seems to be an easy question. However, everyone will give a different result. It is unlikely to make everyone happy in the end. Hence we need to give up some of the users. From my perspective, we need to more focused on the general users. The best method is to have a statistical survey and get the general result from the survey. However, the problem is that sometimes people do not know what they like at all. It seems that everything is good to them, equivalent to say that every design is bad. Hence sometimes, the survey result may not be accurate and correct. That's why we need to learn more from general people. I remember that a lecturer mentioned that a general person is the most random person you will pick on the street during one of my law lectures. Equivalent to say that, the general user for our application is the most random user we pick from all our users. Then apply our common sense to analyze what he/she likes....
2) what is convenience?
In fact, this is also a trouble question to solve. From the high sales of apple products, we know that apple products will have a good design and most of the users said that i-series is convenient, which means the UX is good. How did apple product achieve such goal? I believe that they really have a very deep study on what people like and then try to come up with the most convenient design. They pay attention to every details of the product. That is the only way to come up with the most convenient design.
3) What is beauty?
In order to come up with the best looking UI design, of course we need to understand what is beauty. On the flight to Singapore several months ago, I met a professor from Architecture Department, Tongji University. I asked him what is beauty and how to understand beauty. He told me that it will be a long learning journey. I need to learn from the history and try to have more chances to view masterpieces. What's more, I need to pay more attention on daily life. For example, during the seminar, it is very clear that the lady dress up very nicely. In fact she tried to dress up with her own style. When she came to give the presentation, from what she wears, we already know that she is a good designer. If she can not make herself look beautiful, how could she come up with a nice UI design? Hence in order to learn beauty, start from now and start from self... (For girls, just try to make yourself have your own style. Starting form yourself does not mean to do a lot of makeups and wear expensive dresses. Starting from yourself means finding out the best clothes that will show your personalities. Be yourself. That is beautiful)
To conclude, up to now, I am still not a good designer. Need more time to learn and practice. After a long time, maybe I will be a good designer...
Make up blog: Vsee talk
Finally I come back to my blogs...
Miss many blogs, needs to catch up a bit~~~
Vsee Talk
In fact, this is my second time to hear the talk from CEO of VSee. To be honest, this time it was not as impressive to me as my first time to hear during CS3217.
1. Surprise
In fact, when the first time we met the speaker, I thought he may be someone from the technical side of the company and not in a high leading role. However, after introducing about him, it was totally unexpected. He was the CEO of VSee and what's more, he is in charge of sales and marketing. During his presentation, you can not get the feeling of high enthusiasm. However, when it reached the middle part of the presentation, I realize that how passionate he is and how much he enjoyed his work. Unlike others, his passion is more like water in the river, which is quite but with consistent power and will not stop or change dramatically by the small stones. I also believe that his success highly depends on such personalities.
2. Why him?
In fact, I asked myself why Prof Ben will ask him to give a presentation again. Maybe there are several reasons. But for me, I believe that Prof. Ben indeed wants to show him to us and learn from him.
What we could learn from him?
1) Insist on his dream
For most of the new entrepreneurs, they have passion, they have skills but they just can not wait. As what he has said, it took him 5 years (hope i did not remember wrong) before he really got success. Not many people could wait for such a long time. Most of them will drop in the middle. In fact, it is generally true. For example, I could not continue to write blogs even for one semester...
2) Personalities
He is really a special person. It seems that there is nothing in the world could make him hurry a bit or get furious. I believe that that's why he will have a very good working relation with his employees, teammates. An easy-going person, with dreams and willing to wait, is more likely to succeed. Not every CEO is like Steve Jobs. In fact, most of CEOs are not the Steve types. They are more like our speaker. We could learn from him and make changes. But still need to keep in mind that success can not be copied. We need to figure out our own way to success.
As the conclusion of the reivew, I would like to pick a chinese saying. In fact, after the whole speech, his personalities remind me of this sentence "有容乃大，无欲则刚“. It is really a sentence with deep meaning. Every time, I will get new understanding from reading it. Hence it is pretty hard for me to translate....
Miss many blogs, needs to catch up a bit~~~
Vsee Talk
In fact, this is my second time to hear the talk from CEO of VSee. To be honest, this time it was not as impressive to me as my first time to hear during CS3217.
1. Surprise
In fact, when the first time we met the speaker, I thought he may be someone from the technical side of the company and not in a high leading role. However, after introducing about him, it was totally unexpected. He was the CEO of VSee and what's more, he is in charge of sales and marketing. During his presentation, you can not get the feeling of high enthusiasm. However, when it reached the middle part of the presentation, I realize that how passionate he is and how much he enjoyed his work. Unlike others, his passion is more like water in the river, which is quite but with consistent power and will not stop or change dramatically by the small stones. I also believe that his success highly depends on such personalities.
2. Why him?
In fact, I asked myself why Prof Ben will ask him to give a presentation again. Maybe there are several reasons. But for me, I believe that Prof. Ben indeed wants to show him to us and learn from him.
What we could learn from him?
1) Insist on his dream
For most of the new entrepreneurs, they have passion, they have skills but they just can not wait. As what he has said, it took him 5 years (hope i did not remember wrong) before he really got success. Not many people could wait for such a long time. Most of them will drop in the middle. In fact, it is generally true. For example, I could not continue to write blogs even for one semester...
2) Personalities
He is really a special person. It seems that there is nothing in the world could make him hurry a bit or get furious. I believe that that's why he will have a very good working relation with his employees, teammates. An easy-going person, with dreams and willing to wait, is more likely to succeed. Not every CEO is like Steve Jobs. In fact, most of CEOs are not the Steve types. They are more like our speaker. We could learn from him and make changes. But still need to keep in mind that success can not be copied. We need to figure out our own way to success.
As the conclusion of the reivew, I would like to pick a chinese saying. In fact, after the whole speech, his personalities remind me of this sentence "有容乃大，无欲则刚“. It is really a sentence with deep meaning. Every time, I will get new understanding from reading it. Hence it is pretty hard for me to translate....
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