RMA [ hand-phone benefit specification]

In the last lecture, Jermine and I worked together on constructing profile for boots users. Regarding lady boots, my observation is that women do have the sense of putting on their footwear suitable to the occasion, season and their outfit. When they go out in a chilled atmosphere, then they would definitely like to put on boots below their fur coat . Therefore, in my point of view, boots are the most common choice for women in winter other than in summer time.
Hence, I decided to build up an imaginary subject who would live in a place where there is winter.
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Profile

Cammie is 23 years old. She is currently studying at the Helsinki School of Economics (HSE),Finland. Cammie will be graduating this coming April with an B.A degree. She is very proud to be a student of HSE, which is the largest and leading business school in Finland.

As most of female students, Cammie concerns about fashion, likes shopping and loves traveling.

As the only daughter in her family, Cammie is influenced by both her parents who are very successful in the business world. Since Cammie was young, she dreamed to be a successful business woman. That's the reason why she went to HSE. Cammie studies very well and has high scholarships offered by both school and outside big companies who wish her to work for them after graduating.

Since the first year at HSE, Cammie joined in many school's activities. She thought that those activities would help her to be more confident in public- which is the first and foremost characteristic that a business woman needs to have, make new friends, and gain experiences from them. As a result, in the third year at the university, Cammie was nominated to become a spokesperson for the Young Entrepreneur Club. Cammie is very interested in delivering talk on behalf of the club to attract new members to the Club. She loves the feelings of standing in front of new faces and sharing experiences with them. Many students at school knows Cammie who is not only good at studying but also charming and professional looking.

As the only daughter in a family in which her parents often go overseas for business trip, Cammie raises 2 puppies to make her house less empty. She considers them as brothers and sisters, and always feeds them on time. She often takes them out when she goes jogging.

Cammie is received a lot of care from parents. She loved her parents so much. She's studied music since she was 5 years old. Cammie could play organ and sing very well. With other 4 friends, they form a band namely "Snow" in which Cammie is a singer. The music line that " Snow" choose is Pop. Cammie often spares her scholarship to buy performance clothings. At weekend, Cammie and her band often meet each other. Sometimes, they go shopping to choose performance clothings. At other times, they gather to rehearse for a performance. And always , when they are free from studying, they go to parties together, sing songs, and dance.

Cammie is always aware of what she should do for her family as a filial daughter. She tries to balance time for friends at school, her band and entrepreneur club, family as well as keep her study record always on the top.

Four-pleasure Analysis :

1. Physio- pleasure :

• As a spokesperson for the Young Entrepreneur Club, standing in front of many people and delivering speech, Cammie is aware of keeping her looking in-shape : Need- pleasure

• Jogging keeps Cammie fit and in-shape : Need-pleasure
  

• Many people at school knows Cammie, therefore keeping smiles on her face become a habit of Cammie when she meets people : Appreciation-pleasure

• To be a singer in a music band requires Cammie to change her clothing style a little bit when she's on stage. Therefore, when standing on stage, Cammie allows herself to wear fashionable clothes than the ordinary days: Need- pleasure

2. Socio-pleasure :

• To prepare to become a successful business woman in the future, Cammie pratises herself to be more confident, more professional speaking by joining many school's activities: Need-pleasure

• As the only daughter in her family, Cammie basic social needs are to be loved and be shared , otherwise she feel very lonely. For her, relations with parents and friends at school are very important: Need-pleasure

• Cammie loves the active lifestyle that she is leading and takes a secret pleasure in the status associate with it. Therefore, she loves socializing with people. She loves the feelings of standing in front of people, smiling with them, talking to them, and sharing experiences with them: Appreciation pleasure

3. Psycho – pleasure

• Cammie loves family life, doesn't dare to stay alone. Caring puppies make her feel happy and less lonely: Appreciation pleasure
• Cammie can play organ and sing very well- she derives a sense of a typical girl who loves anything beautiful, and who is musically inclined: Appreciation-pleasure

4. Ideo-pleasure

• Cammie has a sophisticated lifestyle. She feels herself as a real business woman when she delivers a talk professionally. At the same time, she feels herself as an artist who can play music and sing very well: Appreciation-pleasure
• To be known by many people at school as an outstanding student, Cammie's long-term goal is to try even more to keep such perceptions of others about her: Need-pleasure
• To prepare to become a business woman in the future, Cammie leads an independent life. She uses her scholarships to buy performance clothing instead of asking her parents: Need-pleasure

Physio	Socio	Psycho	Ideo
Staying in shape	Belonging feeling	Caring	Active
Flexible in clothes style	Good relationships with others	Sense of achievement	Independent
Professional looking/ Friendly/ Active/ Charming	Status/ Image		Ambitious

Hand-phone Benefit Specification:

A hand-phone for Cammie should have the following pleasures:

1. Physio- pleasure

• The color of charming beauty. Therefore, the phone's cover should be in light color. It should have decent looking - Need
  
• Professional appearance - Appreciation
  
• Small and comfortable because Cammie is very active person so she maybe like something easy and small to carry - Need
  

2. Socio- pleasure

• Cammie loves socializing with people. She has good relationships with many people. Therefore, a hand-phone with function of surfing the Internet, storing as many numbers as possible will help her to facilitate social interaction, or improve relationship - Need
  
• Be well known in school as a spokesperson for Entrepreneur Club and a singer in " Snow" band, a hand-phone which is not really popular may be Cammie's choice. The reason is that it will help Cammie to show her own identities - Appreciation
  

3. Psycho-pleasure

• Cammie is quite busy with both studying and joining school activities. Therefore, an user-friendly hand-phone will be considered. For example, a hand-phone which is equipped with intelligent t9 typing, definitely will allow Cammie to easily type text messages without pressing each key upto 4 times for the correct letter - Need
  

4. Ideo-pleasure

• Cammie is a type of person who has great passion for arts. Therefore, a hand-phone with special design may attract her- Need
  
• With charming looking, Cammie might prefer a hand-phone with girlish looking ( shape, decoration,etc) - Need
  

Based on all mentioned above , I decided to choose Fly Z500 for Cammie


Here are some previews of Fly Z500

• Color: White- light charming color
• Decent looking: compact powder shape which looks very girlish and professional
• The Fly Z500 is capable of surfing the Internet with the built in browser of the phone. With this phone, you may also send MMS, or Multimedia Message Service. The phone is also able to use EMS, or Enhanced Message Service. On top of sending messages, the Fly Z500 is equipped with intelligent t9 typing, which allows you to easily type text messages without pressing each key upto 4 times for the correct letter.

  The Fly Z500 comes fully equipped with a WAP browser, and additionally an HTML browser for normal web page surfing.. including support for java.

• Memory: Phonebook 300 names, for each you can enter up to 4 numbers, e-mail address, you can assign a user to one of 7 groups, assign a call melody and a photo or a picture. You can keep up to 140 SMS

Source: http://www.canadiancontent.net/mobile/Fly_Z500.html
http://www.mobile-review.com/phonemodels/fly/fly-z500-en.shtml

[Pleasure with products] What man devised that he might see

All products have multiple dimensions on which they need to be evaluated. According to the " Emotional Design" book by Donald Norman, different dimensions of a product are identified with different levels of processing by people: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
These three levels translate into three different kinds of design.They are:

1. Visceral design refers primarily to that initial impact, to its appearance.
2. Behavioral design is about look and feel -- the total experience of using a product.
3. Reflection design is about ones thoughts afterwards, how it makes one feel, the image it portrays, the message it tells others about the owner's taste.

I will use three models of eyeglasses as examples of visceral, behavioral and reflective design.

Eyeglasses # 1: Scissors glasses

George Adams, Fleet Street London, patented scissor glasses in 1780

1.Visceral:

• Crude design of the old times, like a scissor. The glasses look cumbersome.

2.Behavioral :

• Very weary to handle, not really comfortable to bring along. Let's imagine what will happen when we use scissor glasses to read book, or to hang out with friends? One hand is always needed to hold the glasses , which will definitely make our hands feel very weary .

3.Reflective:

• This product should have used when there were no other better glasses for people to choose. In the present day, scissor glasses can not be used in daily life for the convenience of the users who prefer small and comfortable products. Instead, it is purchased by museums , or by antique collectors.

Eyeglasses #2: Pierced eyeglasses

Created by artist James Sooy (http://www.jamessooy.com) and Oliver Gibson

Here's the step-by-step:

• Get pierced- an internally-threaded barbell that goes through the skin above the bridge of your nose.
• Use a tabletop mill to cut the L-shaped metal pieces that screw onto the barbell
• Attach rare earth magnets to the glasses; these hold the glasses on.
• Don't get rid of the bridge pieces; they let the lenses sit on your nose and take the actual weight of the lenses.
  

1. Visceral:

• Innovative
• Attractive to some who like piercings.
• Looks more painful than cool. Even, for some it is disgusting. They asked a question of what will happen if the users forget that it is attached to their nose and accidentally snatch it quickly. Some gave ironic comments by saying that "Maybe I could pierce a pen to my finger, or even a toothbrush to my lip and ear".

2. Behavioral: According to James Sooy,

• Bridge piercings doesn't hurt. His piercing was painless due to the fact there were few nerves between the eyes, although, some people have more than others. The piercing actually never touches bone or cartilage, which is a common misconception.
• Wearing pierced glasses doesn't hurt. Actually, because they have no frames there isn't anything rubbing on the ears, which means they can be even more comfortable than normal glasses.
• All the weight is applied to the nose pads, making pierced glasses feel exactly like normal glasses on your face. As the lenses are held by magnets they can easily be removed before bed too.
• Overall, it is safe to wear pierced eyeglasses.
  

3. Reflective

• Self-image, show off
• It is suitable for those who are scared of LASIK surgery. According to James Sooy, " Paying two thousand dollars to have someone cut your eyes and shoot a laser in them ( just so you don't have to wear glasses) seems extreme to me..." Moreover, it is suitable for those who have time and budget limited to undergo eye surgery, yet don't want to be sticked with glasses, because the frame of pierced eyeglasses is $75-$100 US, which is about the same as regular frames.
  

Eyeglasses #3: Gucci eyeglasses Model GG 1438

1. Visceral:

• Beige color is easily to match with clothing
• Looks delicate
• Suitable for ladies
  

2. Behavioral:

• Of course, compared to scissor glasses, this product is easier to handle and more comfortable, more fashionable.
  

3. Reflective:

• Gucci eyeglasses are prestigious brand name. Therefore, wearing this product helps the owners to obtain the status symbol ( which will help to define their status in society), self-image and show off.
  

[Warm up exercise] Bad Design

A product that receives bad quality of experience from users can not be a good design!

iTunes Store

Why did I choose iTunes as the bad design?
Firstly, I'd like to give you some ideas about iTunes, and its basic features. iTunes is known as a digital media player which is very much like Windows Media Player ( WMP). It was first introduced by Apple Inc. in January , 2001 for playing and organizing digital music and video files. Because iTunes is introduced by Apple, it is widely known as a service going along with Apple products, such as Apple iPod. It's very hard to compare iTunes and WMP because it depends on the customers' demands. However, overall iTunes offers end-users with a bunch of features. To name a few, they are:
1. iTunes Store: allow users to download purchased digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games and feature lengh films.
2. Playlists : " Smart playlists" are playlists that can be set to automatically updated based on customer' options.
3. Music library: a virtual library allowing users to import and export songs, acess and edit a song's attributes.
4. File format support: read, write, and convert between MP3, WMA, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC.
5. Printing: print song lists, and album lists.
6. Plugins: ( very much like WMP) allows users to create music-driven visual displays

7. Podcasting
8. Synchronizing iPod: iTunes can automatically synchronize its music and video library with an iPod everytime it is connected. New songs and playlists are automatically copied to the iPod and songs that have been deleted from the library on the computer are also deleted from the iPod. Automatic synchronization can be turned off in favor of manually copying individual songs according to users' preferences. iTunes supports only copying music to the iPod but not from it.

etc...

However, sometimes "the best ideas are the simplest ideas". A lot of features accidentally turned iTunes into the bad design and stole the user-friendliness of the product.

User Reaction
I chose two people for the reflection of the product. One never used iTunes before, and the other one has used iTunes for 5 months ( she bought her first iPod in September, 2006). The reason I chose two kinds of users was to test the user-friendliness and the design of iTunes.

1. New user: She looked impatient when she tried to open iTunes. She kept double- clicking on iTunes icon until the interface of iTunes appeared on the computer screen. She felt annoyed when clicking on some buttons under LIBRARY ( Music, Movies, etc) because it took time to load those programs. For her, WMP and iTunes are merely tools of playing and organizing music, therefore why we don't use WMP instead of iTunes. She kept asking me about all the features of iTunes. Then, she wanted to show me one of her favorite song. Her song happened to be in wma file. When she right-clicked to choose playing that song with iTunes, that song couldn't play. She tried with another song in mp3, that song played. She said all her songs in spite of their formats ( wma or mp3) can be played with WMP. Generally, for her, iTunes is very slow to open, not user-friendly to new users compared to WMP.
2. Current user : Here are her feedbacks after using iTunes in 5 months
   

• Bad #1:Not user-friendly :She admited that she spent the whole evening learning how to use iTunes, and how to export music from iTunes to iPod.
  
• Bad #2 : Causing computer hang : iTunes software is quite big. Therefore, whenever she opens it, her computer ( IBM T43, RAM: 2 dimm, each with 512 MB) is slowed down. Sometimes, her computer is hung for a while if she opens many programs at the same time.
• Bad # 3 : iTunes can read some file formats only ( as mentioned earlier). Therefore, it takes time for iTunes to convert songs from wma format into AAC format. Her music folder is around 10 GB with many songs in wma format. Therefore, she couldn't stand iTunes when it converted all those songs into AAC format. Frankly speaking, she said time for iTunes to convert individual song is quite fast. But to convert a big amount of songs in wma format, it really slows down her computer. She admitted that she gave up so many times by stopping the converting process. As a result, another problem came out. Next time when she chose to export some musics into iTunes, the same process of converting happened, which created duplicated songs ( Songs are converted twice. You can see some songs are duplicated in the picture below). For her, it is a flaw of iTunes in a sense that it can't recognize those songs that have already been converted.
• Bad #4 : It is very time-consuming to arrange music folder manually. Her iPod has a capacity of 2GB, whereas her music in total is 10GB. Therefore, she had to choose songs which she wanted to sync to iPod manually. Otherwise, iTunes will inform that the music in the library exceeds the capacity of iPod. As a result, no single music is copied into iPod.
  
• Bad #5 : Synchronizing iPod causes troubles sometimes. She told me about her bad experience with iTunes. Her iPod used to run out of battery when she didn't bring her laptop along. Therefore, she had to use her friend's computer to charge ( by downloading iTunes into her friend's computer). Because she didn't notice of the automatic update function of iTunes , all her music in iPod went out by updating the empty music folder ( which is on his friend's computer).
  

All in all, she complained about flaws and complicatedness of iTunes.

After interacting with iTunes, both new user and current user agreed that iTunes is not user-friendly enough. As a result, for the current user, she only uses iTunes when charging her iPod , and most of the time she still uses WMP for playing music. Lesson learnt here is that user-friendliness is one of the determinant factors for users to adopt a particular product. In terms of brand name, both are aware of the service offered by Apple.

My reflection:

I used to undergo what the new user experienced. And I have the same thoughts of the current user after using iTunes for nearly a year. Moreover, I have a very bad experience with iTunes. That time my computer was affected with viruses or something that I was not really sure. As a result, it made my computer very slow. However, I still tried to charge my iPod when my computer was very slow. What happened was that iTunes seemed unable to open, iTunes couldn't recognize iPod. However, the charging was still completed. But when I touched on the iPod , it got shock , which was very scared. I would say fairly that the iPod got shock was not due to iTunes. However, based on the 2 reactions I got from friends ( new user and current user) and based on my bad experience with iTunes, I would say iTunes is not really as a good design as people often boast . Instead, it is really a BAD DESIGN to some extent.

My very first ever entry

Hi everyone !
Welcome to my little house of NM4210. I created this blog for the purpose of posing assignments and all things related to the ' User Experience Design' module. Your comments will make my blog more fun and interesting ^_^