Welcome

I am a huge fan of Southwest airlines they get you where you need to go for a reasonable price. A few weeks ago I tried to book my flight home and kept getting this error message "The purchaser's first name was not entered. Please return to the previous page and enter the purchaser's first name." So I check to make sure my passenger info is entered and try again. Same thing again so I gave up thinking there was a glitch.

I saw the form pictured below and thought that part was only for people using PayPal to checkout so I guessed the next page would have the information for those of us not using PayPal.

So tonight I tried again filled out the form and got the same error. Here is the payment part of the form.

After staring at it for a little while I realized I was supposed to enter my credit card information in the boxes below the PayPal button. Ok, I see now but this doesn't make sense.

Out of curiosity I clicked the PayPal button to see what it would do. Here is the result of that.

My confusion was in the fact that indented below the PayPal button was the form for the credit card info. This is an easy fix I think.

That is much clearer to me. Click the credit card button and fill in the info below it. Click the PayPal button and poof it is gone and you go through the PayPal checkout.

Tonight I had an interesting discussion with a group of first year HCI students regarding the CHI 2008 design competition. We are all working on it as part of different classes but face similar problems.

The part of the discussion I found the most interesting was how people design and where their inspiration comes from. For some it comes from research others from the actual subject themselves or a population close to the subject at hand. It is really interesting to watch these students start to find who they are in the design realm. Everyone has their own ways of finding inspiration and these first year students are just starting to develop their design processes and voice.

Something I have really started to internalize over the past few days is my design inspiration and voice. I have realized that I am really a human-centered designer. The reason I came back to school was to learn more about usability which is a very human-centered field. I have learned so much more than just usability in the domain of HCI in the past year and a half. I have realized people are my inspiration. This is how I helped my team come up with our CHI solution. I saw a problem some interesting points and found a possible solution.

Much of my research for capstone has been papers that talk to people or statistics about people. My capstone is about a group of people and I am waiting on Human Subjects Committee approval to survey this group of people. It is kind of funny when you finally internalize something that was there all along.

Another topic was the PRInCiPleS framework and its merits as a design system. One of the students debated that this was not a useful way to design and that his team had thrown it out. Other people from other teams talked about how they are using it and how it is helpful. The PRInCiPleS are not intended to be a end all be all solution for everything they are just a framework that helps you make sure you have everything covered to create a solid design argument. Also as someone else said if you get stuck it is a good place to come back to and say ok where am I and can this help guide me toward a solution. Thinking about my capstone project I started to try and fit things in to the PRICPS as we lovingly call it and realized that I am doing it without really thinking about it.

As has been said many times before design is a very non linear process. I believe everyone has to take the ideas that are out there regarding design and find their own way to design.

Find your own process and run with it.