IDT 501 Final Project

The NPR site misses the opportunity to be much more "panoramic"

Users could be given an opportunity to explore other works by these directors...

...and look at more than two related stories.

Malleability

The NPR site is malleable, allowing users to "pick-and-mix and sculpt the environment". In order to use the site's customization features, users need to set up an account. Once they have done this, they can do relatively simple things like select the kind of news they want delivered by e-mail or more sophisticated things like customized streaming of content. The site also provides an API (application programming interface) that allows users to access NPR content and integrate it into their own web applications.

Inclusiveness

The NPR site allows users to identify their local NPR radio station, set up news feeds from that station, and even makes provides information on transmitter location and signal strength. This provides a inclusiveness, making site users (and NPR listeners) feel like they are a part of the NPR community.

The site's social networking feature also provides inclusiveness, enabling users to become part of a national (or international) community of NPR listeners.

E-Mail Access to Content

Streaming Content

...get local news feeds...

Coherence

Customization via API

Coherence – clarity of embedded meanings (Cooley, 2000, p. 68) – is demonstrated on the NPR site by the use of icons, visual language icons, and the structuring of specific types of content within well-defined regions on the page.

Information Design

...makes users

part of a community.

Social networking...

Content Regions

Users can find their local station...

Visual Language Icon

“Communication by words, pictures, charts, graphs, maps, pictograms, and cartoons.” (Passini, 2000, p. 84)

...and determine the location and signal strength of their local station.

Visual Icons

Analysis of the

NPR Website

Responsiveness

While the NPR site's malleability enables users to customize access to content, it lacks responsiveness to users individual needs and actions. The "Search" function, for example, lacks a number of features -- completion of key words, saving of terms used previously and so on -- that users have come to expect from search engines such as Google.

Information design is “the organization of information to achieve preconceived goals”. (Thwaites, 2000, p. 224).

The search function, like the rest of the site, is lacking in responsiveness.

Human

Centered Design

Human centered design (HCD) envisages...forms of human-machine interaction resulting in a human-machine symbiosis. (Cooley, 2000, p. 65)

Panoramic

The NPR (National Public Radio) website at www.npr.org is a general news and information site.This analysis will assess how well the NPR website conforms to the nine key characteristics of HCD (human centered design).

With the wealth of content available to it, the NPR website has the opportunity to be panoramic, offering users the opportunity to more fully understand the context of the information presented on the site. Unfortunately, the site fails at this. For example, an article about Disney's "Oceans" could provide a huge assortment of links that would broader a user's perspectives. Links information about the directors, environmental issues, biology, and other content could be easily added. Instead, only four links -- two for video clips and two for related stories -- are included with this story.

Coherence

The embedded meanings, if not immediately evident, at least must not be cloaked or obsucre. A related concept here means rendering highly visible what is going on and what is possible. (Cooley, 2000, p. 68)

Transcendence

When operating the system, the user should be encouraged, enticed, and even provoked to transcend the immediate task requirements. The possibility of acquiring boundary knowledge and a macrolevel vision of the process as a whole should be self-evident. (Cooley, 2000, p. 70)

Malleability

A possibility to mold the situation to suit, to pick-and-mix, and sculpt the environment to suit one's own instrumental needs, aestheitic tastes, and craft traditions. (Cooley, 2000, p. 68)

Panoramic

Characteristics of Human Centered Design

Good embedded systems should provide windows or apertures through which one can take a wider or more panoramic view. This encourages the acquisition of boundary knowledge and allows the user to act more effectively and competently by locating what he or she is doing in the understanding of a wider context. (Cooley, 2000, p. 70)

Human centered design has nine key characteristics... (Cooley, 2000, p. 68)

Inclusiveness

The system should be inviting and tend to invite you in and make you feel part of the community of activities with which you are familiar and on friendly terms. (Cooley, 2000, p. 68)

Purpose

The system is capable of responding to the purpose the user has in mind and then eoncouraging him or her to go beyond it. (Cooley, 2000, p. 70)

Engagement

Responsiveness

A sense that one is being invited to participate in the process and which creates a feeling of empathy. (Cooley, 2000, p. 68)

Ownership

A general sense that you can get the system to respond to your requirements and your individual needs and ways of doing things. A system that makes visible its own rules and then encourages one to learn them and to change them at will. (Cooley, 2000, pp. 68-70)

IDT Final Project:

Analysis of Websites &

Human Centered Design

SUNY IT

Master of Science - Information Design & Technology

Peter von Stackelberg

Spring 2010

A feeling that you have created and thereby own parts of the system. A sense of belonging and even companionship as traditional craftsmen may feel with a favorite machine tool. (Cooley, 2000, p. 68)

Amazon URL for "Information Design" by Robert Jacobson

http://www.amazon.com/Information-Design-Robert-Jacobson/dp/0262600358/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272059584&sr=1-1

Cooley, M. (2000). Human-Centered Design. In R. Jacobson, Information Design (pp. 59 - 81). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Passini, R. (2000). Sign-Posting Information Design. In R. Jacobson, Information Design (pp. 83 - 97). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Thwaites, H. (2000). Visual Design in Three Dimensions. In R. Jacobson, Information Design (pp. 221 - 245). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.