Teaching and Learning

Check out Adobe Education Exchange if you’d like to learn more about all things digital creation! Adobe’s Education Exchange, known by the instructors as “edex” is great resource for teachers, instructional designers and anyone who wants to create or communicate most effectively.

I’m currently taking a class that combines self-paced lectures and live online meetings. Students are introduced to and encouraged to use many online collaboration tools like edex and Behance as well as Twitter and Facebook. There are more than 3000 students all over the world taking this course! In order to turn in assignments for credit each student must review three other students work. It’s great seeing work from people with totally different perspectives.

So far, I’ve learned and tried many ways to create slide shows, videos and interactive digital publications such as ebooks. We use Adobe products such as Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign as well as other apps and tools like 30Hands, Animoto, Adobe Voice, Adobe Clip, Video Scribe.  I’ve also gotten much faster in Photoshop now that I am using keyboard shortcuts.

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Prototyping Google X Style

Tom Chi gave a great talk, “Rapid Prototyping X, Methods and Debugs”, at the Dec 2014 Hack.Summitt about inventing Google Glass. He described the method to the madness (laser projected keyboards, real-time 3-d mapping, and brain control) that went into creating Google Glass while he was head of product experience at Google.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin challenged the Google X group: “What would it take to have google in your brain?”  The team came up with prototypes to test in hours instead of months.

The Google X Team

1. Knew the difference between guessing and direct experience and tested their ideas out.
2. Kept research broad, fast and shallow -15 hardware prototypes every week for 10 weeks.
3. Found “stars” stand out experiences and constellations (they were shooting for the moon after all).

Tom spoke about two main situations that you can use google glass

1. ambient awareness
2. real-time information while on task – technician, surgeon, anesthesiologist, factory worker, wall street trader

For more Tom Chi, watch Tom’s TED Talk.  See the Google Glass Development website.  Wikipedia on Google X Projects.

Design Portfolio

Thinking about Thumbs

Luke Wroblewski tweeted 3 links about Designing for the thumb:

1. Designing for Thumb Flow  features video that shows how you use polar with one thumb.

2. Scott Hurff explains how the “thumb hook” gesture used often in Facebook’s new Paper app might drive the sale of arthritis medication in a few years. He then shares a Thumb Zone template to use when designing for the most comfortable area for one handed touch.

3. Michael Oh demonstrated the Vice Versa UI pattern that bisects the screen diagonally and allows for a more natural thumb motion. This works best for two choices that are the opposite of each other.