Bake-off 2
Overview: Group project for Designing Human Centered Software, designed program to make it faster and easier for users to match a square with a target square in position, size, and rotation
Role: Designer & Project Manager
Tools: Java & Processing
Team members: Brian Lee, Maya Pandurangan
Duration: 2 weeks
Problem Space
In doing tasks in graphic design such as placing a logo on a page, a shape has to be placed, rotated, and resized, which often takes many moves to get right.
Goal
Our task was to place, rotate and resize the square to fit the target square as quickly and accurately as possible.
Features
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dot in the center of the target square guides user to place square accurately
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user clicks intersection of line and circle to correctly resize and rotate square
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guideline improves user speed & accuracy
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color changes for visual feedback, auditory feedback as well
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wanted to give as much feedback to the user as possible to increase accuracy
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user can right click to zoom in for small squares
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hard to be accurate for super small squares, so we added a zoom feature
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by making the square the maximum size allowed and clicking, the user can undo the placement step if they misplaced the square
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since the penalty was pretty high, we wanted to include a simple way to undo mistakes
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cross cursor, semi-transparent circle
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these features were added later on to avoid blocking the squares as much as possible
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Prototyping
First round prototype
Second round prototype
Third round prototype
Final thoughts
I felt we did well on this design, but something we didn't take into account was the fact that in testing, some of the users made errors in the undoing placement step, since they clicked before the square reached its maximum size and got a penalty. If we were to continue with this project, we would definitely find a more intuitive and less error-prone way of fixing mistakes.