This week I engaged in a group task of sketching an interface for an app accompanying a smart pot. I began by mapping out the app’s pages and features necessary for our chosen function, connecting a pot to the app and setting it up. These included a home page, a screen for pairing a pot, a pot configuration screen, a pop-up to show the user if the pot has been connected successfully, and an option to add plants to the pot. Considering all the necessary processes and screens made the sketching process much easier and quicker, as I already knew what I would need to sketch, and could focus on the design and usability rather than having to think about what was needed while sketching.
I also noted the ease of sketching over creating wireframes in Figma. I was able to complete the sketching part of the task in around 30 minutes after the preparation work was done, where in Figma, to create the same screens in lo-fi may have taken an hour or perhaps even more. This highlighted to me the importance of sketching ideas, and I will use sketches for my own project to develop it in the early stages, now that I have defined the brief and begun considering the form my project will take.
I found it interesting to see the applications of Miller’s Law in real products. When I consider how I would use the (good examples of) products shown in the lecture, they are not only more visually appealing thanks to the lack of clutter, but do not overwhelm the user, which is evidence that the law has worked in practice. The example taken from Amazon is particularly striking to me as a bad example, where the law has not been taken into consideration, I do not know where I should look first due to the overwhelming number of items and categories, and find myself looking back to places I have already viewed due to forgetting what was shown. There are also several navigation bars in one screen which further confuses the user, due to showing an even more unnecessary amount of content than the user can remember at one time. A particularly noteworthy area is the bar under the heading “Books” as it not only shows more than 7 items, but lengthy words are used, and each item seems unrelated to each other.