Wei Zhou’s Blog

Many facts suggest that you should marry to a designer.

First, designer are smart and constantly optimizing user experiences in their lives. Today designers are no longer artist, almost all of them are tech-savvy and bright. They like solving problems- so they are fully capably of fixing pipes for you; they are curious about everything in the world – your life will be fulfilled surprises. For designers, a string of URL gives them a whole new free toy to play with which immediately makes your life beautiful – they are not nagging like others because they are always playing or making stuff: you’ll have customized everything in your house and hand-made wine, chocolate, card and cake in your wedding anniversary.

Second. Designers are rich. They are born entrepreneurs, that means they are seeking every way of making money with innovative ideas. Don’t be surprised if you know a designer has 6 companies at the same time. Today design has never attracted as much attentions as it used to be – it encapsulates so many levels of skillets; as designers, they are much more powerful than they were: because they are designing business for other people.

Third, designers have freedom. Freelance designer is surely the best job in the world – not only because the nature of design requires the usage of both right and left brain so you won’t risk your other half having high suicide rate as a creative writers or artists, or retiring intelligence of football players. Designers surely look younger because the beauty and harmony they involve with everyday, and yes, as freelancers, they sleep a lot everyday, and if you like, they have the time to pick up kids.

Fourth, designers are happy people. Designers have the best friends. Their clients are passionate and hopeful people with fantastic dreams who believe beautiful design can make a difference in their life – never a change of dealing with desperate and angry clients as lawyers do everyday.

Fifty, designers are family guys and girls. They may like clubbing but never as much as they love their job or their life. They are never wasted as investment bankers do. Designers spend money appropriately because design is the art of balancing limited resource and quality. You’ll find your life quality increased significantly after you live with her/him, with less money, of course.

Yeah, marry a designer, you’ll never be wrong.

Recently I’m attending CHI at Boston. I got a chance to hang out with my high school friends who happen to attend harvard and MIT here. I’m happy to find my best friends are way more successful than I do – I’m impressed that they(who used to be my crappy highschool mates)becomes the leader of Chinese industries. Leo Guo(Founder of tongxue.com) recommends me this website that I began to fall in love with: Moko.cc. It’s a Chinese website that gathers the prettiest girls, uses can rate them online based on their judgement of “beauty”. This idea is bold, I expect to see a similar web service in US soon.

Obviously they have a very good user experience designer, the website looks consistant, energetic and bold. Here’s a screenshot of their website:

I know, a beauty industry 2.0.

The most impressive thing is, I’m amazed by their advanced user experience ideo, they integrate the user experience and branding rightly, and creates a very user-friendly look and feel. It proves the moto:”User-centered design’s biggest failure is, users only adapts to what they have, and real cool experience emerges from talent design.”

Here’s a list of cute icons.

1.Fashion model. 2. Magzine model. 3. Car model.

1. Fashion photography. 2. Advertising photography. 3. Personal photography.

1. Makeup artist. 2. Hair stylist. 3. Nail artist.

1.Producer. 2. TV/Movie director. 3. TV/Movie supervisor.

1. 3D designer. 2. Visual effect designer. 3. Visual Designer.

1. Fashion designer. 2. Architect. 3. Interior designer.

1.Industrial designer. 2. Interaction designer. 3. Game designer.

1. Painter/Illustrator. 2. Writer. 3. Dancer.

1. Drama performer. 2. planner/Coordinator. 3. Caligrapher.

1. Visual artist. 2. Behavior artist. 3. Collector.

1. Sculptor. 2. Drama director. 3. Talk show artist/Acrobatics artist.

1. President. 2. VP. 3. CEO

1. Actor. 2. Scriptwriter. 3. Photographer/Camera people.

1. Agent. 2. Lawyer. 3. Nurse.

1. TV photographer. 2. MC. 3. Post production producer

1. Visual effect director. 2. Movie/TV producer. 3. Body Model

1. Music producer. 2. Singer. 3. Music player.

1. Landscape photographer. 2. Post-production artist. 3. Fashion stylist/consultant.

1. Graphic designer. 2. Interaction designer. 3. Illustrator.

1. Flight attendants. 2. Pilot. 3. Programmer.

1. Drum player. 2. DJ. 3. Scriptwriter/ Composer.

1. Recorder. 2. Music post-poduction producer. 3. Music related people

I love those icons and think they are very innovational. It’s a good branding + user experience stragtigy as well.

Bonus:

the moko man

MOKO: cannot find the user.

I gave a talk about future web trends the other day, here’s a link for the original Vimeo video:

Design or Die – Innovation, UCD, Web and Life (Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Spring 09) from Mozilla Labs – Concept Series on Vimeo.

I listed four themes for the future web, they are:

1. Data. Open, linked data and Metadata.

- Semantic web

- Human computation

2. Self. Self representation.

- Personalization

- Self extension

3. World. A connected world.

- Tangible interaction

- Contextual awareness

4. Life. A digitalized life.

- Virtual reality

- Service web

I also raised about the topics of:

1. What is design?

2. Designer’s multiple roles

3. Where indeed does innovation come from?

4. Custimazable user centered design process.

As I always love design challenges, here’s the email I received from my adviser, I’m glad to know it finally becames a course project, which I originally wanted to do here in basic interaction design class I TAed last semester.

“Dear CMU designers, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has just announced the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. We’re inviting design-focused students from around the world to develop new ideas & prototypes for the future of the Web. The Design Challenge will be held in two stages: In the first stage students submit mockups of their ideas; during the second phase we will run an exclusive three week tutoring & mentoring program during in which the students will turn their static mockups into dynamic prototypes. Final polished prototypes will be posted, and honors for “best in class” will be bestowed. We would like to invite students from your faculty to join us in the first Design Challenge. It would be great if you could point your students to the website, and invite them submit their ideas.

You’ll find more details about the Design Challenge on the Mozilla Labs blog at: http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/01/introducing-the-design-challenge/ Further information can be found in the following article published by WIRED magazine: http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/envisioning-the.html We are looking forward hopefully to working with you & your students.”

As one of the luckiest people who had the chance to participate in this project earlier, I’d love to share some extra thoughts if someone will do the job.

1. Rethink the future. My definition of future web browser evolves with time, and now it’s completely different than it was in the summer. When I designed my piece “Lifestream”, I thought about today rather than the future, mostly on how to improve the current situation, less reflection on the society we will live in tomorrow. However, tomorrow, our younger brothers and sisters will live a digital life which they took granted, HTML and web design will become high school required courses, software becomes an art form, computers exist everywhere and web is no longer looked like the form that of today. What is their definition of a browser? Is a browser a extension of brain, a tool to access, store and process information, or a self-presentation medium? or something completely out of imagination? With those questions in mind, use one sentence to summarize “what is a browser”, and come back to examine what we had today, we may gain cool insights.

2. User behaviors, always. I didn’t do much of that during the summer, so-called user-centered design research. But it’s a very powerful tool, I admitted. Not just examine what people do on the Internet, but observe what they do in their contextual daily life, what do they need in a specific situation, then construct patterns, transform ideas, to digital world. It turns out we use browser in a highly contextual way, it stores our daily memory in the browser’s history, and represent our virtual self in a form that might be different than our real self. For me, it is meaningful, because in the near future, personalized semantic content representation will be the key to any successful user experience design, and popular browser companies, such as Firefox, should take the responsibility.

3. Focus and Concrete, use a story. I’d suggest you, designers, focus on one thing rather than the whole experience. You may end up only design an experience for book collectors who use browser to search antique books, but that’s people’s everyday browsing life.

So much for today. Wei at weizhoudesign.com

I searched “wei zhou” in live search, pretty much just for curiosity, then this result pops out first:

Buy Wei. You may get 8% off with PalPal if eligible. – eBay…Wei Zhou, an interaction designer, currently pursuing her master degree in Carnegie Mellon…

I wonder how this could happen!

Also, here’s a recent poster for a social networking website development plan:The pattern of extended Self in interaction design research

And yap, a video sketch for service design class – if you are still familiar with Steve Won and Maria Emerson, two interns in Mozilla last and this summer, you’ll be surprised because ” they are going to have a baby!”… the video is done within 35 hours – of course, continuously 35 hours.

Sync video

Check it out! it’s really fun!I’ll update my portfolio in the winter.

This story can only happen in Carnegie Mellon University. I always love CMU over Yale, because CMU promotes team work, I can work with people from different backgrounds here, where designers, psychologists, MBA students, HCI researchers and computer scientists get together, and we work with real clients all the time. I’m a way happier than I was in Yale.

Three ex-Mozilla interns, me, Maria, and Steve were assigned into the same team in Shelley Evenson’s service design class. It’s absolutely a coincidence, so we subconsciously keep low-key and not ware Mozilla T-shirts all three people together at the same time. So far we work very hard on making our design not suck. However we maybe embedded Mozilla’s soul into our process – a pure clean service system, with personalized service “plug-ins”. I’m really looking forward how the final prototype would be.

Yeah, we strive to be the best team in this class. GO TEAM!

I haven’t updated my blog for a while. The FLU is really killing me. I just got to know there’re different kinds of FLUs, and I am the lucky person who is got attacked by more than one.

But nothing can stop me doing fun stuff. These are screen shots for my recent project “Digital Self”. I programmed it in processing. Haha, I have to admit it, when comes to the UI stuff, processing sucks.

Well, the basic idea, as I said before, the web browser knows more than you know about yourself. As much as I analyze the data, I realized those “Google map search” means more than just one keyword, it encapsulates all my feelings and emotions at that time. I vividly remember the moment I searched “Mountain view taxi” when my car was broken and I was anxious about being late to airport. These stories, alone with the search keywords, suddenly jump out of my mind, like I pressed the Replay button of a movie player. If we see in the near future, a software can be expressed in an art form, and the fundamental question would be  “How do we enhance meaningful human experience “. The browsing history, literally becomes a backup memory library.

I didn’t do a good job because of time constraints.  This application reads your local moz_places.sql file, and sorts the browsing data either by category or time. You can enter an estimation of how much time you spend online for sth, and the application will tell you how to monitor yourself better.

This is the animated beginning. Each dot represents one single site entry.(by site, not by url).

Yeah, that’s my own data. Haha. You can see I actually spend a lot of time studying and working!

Well, if you are interested in this visualization application, please email me your moz_place.sqlite file.

I’m recently obsessed with human identity, perception and self-expression. In Stacie’s course ‘ Information and interaction’, I proposed to do a 6 weeks project naming “Digital Self”. The goal is quite simple: Explore the difference between your real self in the society and your digital self on the Internet.  The method is even simpler: by analyzing people’s daily browsing activities. I plan to build this piece by Processing(as usual), the final delivery will be an “artistic” interactive piece – I’m suffering with CMU’s rigorous design research, usibility tesing and seminar reading education, it’s time to have some fun.

So what’s a Digital Self and why start from a web browsing history analysis?

People may scared if they realized that their browser knows themselves more than they do. The browser traced down every single activity you do on the Internet, that somehow reflects you as a whole slightly different than you are in the real world.

For example, here are some variables that may reflects your “Internet” personality.

Your most frequent visiting sites.

- If I ask you to list some favorite sites, the answer you give me might be different than the answer given by your browser. You may not realize why you actually spend 30 hours on Facebook monthly, that conflicts with your goal – study harder.

How long do you stay at a site

- Spending 10 hours shopping on Amazon and 10 seconds to check things on Amazon reflects different personalities. If we did a long-term research, you may find you are easily obsessed with one thing, or you may like to change your focus frequently. That’s a very interesting Internet personality.

Your browsing time

- This directly reflects your schedule, how busy you are.

Sites category you visited over time

- When you are relax and happy, you will visit a lot of sites you like, otherwise, if you are hitting a deadline, you will only visit sites related to your work. However the sites people visit reflects how they release their pressure, such as watching a cartoon after a long time work.

Your search result

- Reflects your curiosity

What do you tag or bookmark a page

- This may reflect your Internet self in a social context.

What much do you comment or upload things on Internet(In versus Out)?

- If you only get, never give, does that mean you have a selfish personality on the Internet?

…

It will be interesitng to build a framework for Internet Self Study, but I think that’s phychologists’ job.

Actually I like Google products over a lot of others. But there’s something out there makes me not a big fan of it. Eventually I cannot endure it anymore and decide to write something. I think Google, being considered as one of the leading software companies in the world, has the responsibility to make their product user experience not suck, not only in terms of usability, but of aesthetics.

If everybody is using Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Doc, we begin to lose our control over our choices of web applications, just as we have to use Windows OS. So welcome to a software modernism age. Welcome Google’s fast-food web apps. Keep Google Bauhaus design doctrine in mind: “Our Web Apps are so simple, secure and fast, that’s all you need for your Internet.”

Is simple, secure and fast all we want? If design is about the value,not the truth, where can we target our values in this fast-food software culture? When can a piece of software become a form of art, bringing people altimate enjoyment?When can a web Apps functions beyond a tool, behave like a digital being or digital asistant that help us in an interesting and considerate way? Can softare have personalities, catering to their master(user)’s ever-changing needs and interests? Google basically ignores all of those possibilities and proves itself proudly: A group of engineers, make softwares, work hard to make every engineer happy, and change every Internet user to a engineer.

I have been using iPhone for three weeks now. Here’s a normal iPhone user daily schedule.

• 7:00 AM: iPhone Alarm wakes me up
• 7:01 AM: Check facebook, twitter, mySpace, Blog, School email, Gmail, company email, open MC chats, log into msn and AIM, Gmail, skype(wifi), IRC(wifi).Quickly check TODO.
• 7:05 AM: Fully wake up. Hold iPhone and run to the bathroom. Listen to Stitcher’s new radios. Cook breakfast, check iPhone for nutrition info.
• 7:30 AM: Bring my iPhone(and my iPhone charger!), walk to the bus stop, read Newsstand RSS feeds, check Stanza, Jamed, NetNewsWire, and Shovel, digg news and comment on other people’s blogs.
• 8:00 AM: On the bus stop, search iWant for local bus schedule.
• 8:30 AM: Class begin. Use Note&Sketch to take notes, use FileMagnet to view course outline.
• 8:35 AM: Bored. Check iGotchi and feed my pet.
• 9:00 AM: Teacher forgot my name. Use Shout it, display “Wei Zhou” and wave to him.
• 9:30 AM: Use Camera to take a picture of my teacher, publish through ShoZu, send it to facebook, flickr, MySpace, WordPress and Picasa.
• 10:30 AM: Class ends, update my Diary. Play Tris, Tap Tap.
• 11:30 AM: Run for another class, focus on teaching, Camera bad students sleep in class.
• 12:00 AM. Break. Use VoiceNotes to record student’s requirements.
• 1:30 PM: Starving. Check Urbanspoon for food.Drive up there using maps.Turn on Pathtracker because I’m directionally challenged. Using where to find Starbucks.
• 2:30 PM: Graffitio notify me another CMU friend in Starbucks is using iPhone as well.Exchange cellphone number with him.Textmessage another friend to join us. Send him our location using Over Here. Share Loopt with them.
• 3:00 PM:Another class. Bored. Use Lifecast to record class discussion.
• 5:50 PM: End class. Repeat 1:30 PM.
• 6:30 PM: Another class. Explore new Apps on App Store.
• 8:30 PM: School ends. Walk back home. Study english using Blanks. Update TODO. Repeat 7:01 AM.
• 9:30 PM: Homework time, use SnatchTest as a mouse for my Macpro.Use controller for my iTV and iPod player.
• 10:30 PM: Play Ambient to get to sleep.

P.S.: Repeat 7:01 AM many times during the day.

What else do I need?

• Support remote printing.
• Every time I jump from one App to another App, the previous one stops working, I have to reopen it afterwards. That really stops my work-flow. I wish it works like Tabs in a browser(Or even better). In summery, the navigation is bad.
• Constantly pressing the main home button is annoying. Especially when I lay on the bed, holding the iPhone with one hand, I don’t want to move another hand. Can I just do everything use one hand?
• I wish I could track my iPhone using history.
• Searching is painful. iPhone should have an universal Google search button on the device.
• Typing is painful. I need a auto-type App.
• How can I copy and paste info from one App to another???!!!
• I need a Firefox browser App

How to design a Multi-touch interaction framework from ground up? IPhone just scratched the surface of a smart phone design – for me iPhone is a device that combines a bunch of unrelated separate gadgets together. It’s getting there, but hardly to be considered as “Smart”. Multi-touch gesture standards will be set up within next 5 years. What we need is no longer a “smart phone“, but a smart browser that embedded in a mobile device, In this way we would be able to use a series of small Apps in a meaningful combination, adjusting to people’s ever-changing task flow and context, without interrupting people’s thinking model over time(also see Ubiquity). That makes a digital device really become part of our body, like our hands and feet.

Yes. Building a variety of cool Apps is important, but not as important as arranging them in a useful way(Outsourcing part of human thinking to machines?). That applies to Small screen browser design, as well as browser for OS. Human beings are task-oriented, not tool-oriented.  Guess that’s the difference between a human and a computer.

As a designer we usually need to answer three questions:”What”, “Why”, and “How”. Here I delve into what and why, not much how. I found Aza’s blog particularly interesting -  Ambient information. Because it also talked about how. We need more “Hows”.