Lo-Fi Class Feedback 2/18/10

By Annie | Published: February 19, 2010

Prototype

Great idea using paper prototypes (3)

Bookmarklet

Create a bookmarklet/ browser plugin (3)

Photoshop vs Browser

Bringing videos into photoshop might be overload.
Would want the links to display in a browser instead of bringing them into Photoshop
Whatever we decide to do with text based tutorials should be the same for videos. They should be treated the same way.
Can users view bookmarks in a browser or can they only access them in Photoshop?

Other Considerations

Make the search results reflect the prior activity of the user
Is there a privacy checkbox for users? Users might not want to share or only want to share for a limited amount of time.
Keep users logged in
Add recommendations based on what you just searched for (Eytan)
Use the integration w/photoshop to suggest stuff that’s relevant – like using windows, using cs5, etc. (Eytan)

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This week our team met a few times to sketch ideas and hammer out the structure of our PS widget. We sketched all of the primary screens, and met with Eytan to talk about technical implementation issues and ways to implement a recommender system. We are talking about ways to recommend tutorials to people based on ‘favorited’ tutorials. We plan to finish our paper prototype by early next week and run some tests before our next class. We will then move to a higher fidelity prototype and incorporate the improvements that surfaced during our initial tests.

Here are some pictures of our work so far:

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Team status update 1/29/10

By Katie | Published: January 27, 2010

Over the past week our team interviewed nine people to learn about their photoshop habits; three were beginner/intermediate level users, and six were advanced or expert. See our interview results and findings for more information. We learned about the barriers that might prevent people from contributing content or designs to a photoshop community – the main two were lack of confidence and lack of motivation to expend the time/effort to contribute. If our team decides to move forward with asking users to submit content or tutorials to our site, we will need to place a lot of emphasis on community members’ unique contribution and importance.

Because our users reported sometimes having a hard time finding the information/tutorials they are looking for, we are also looking into options (apps on ning, at the moment) that might allow people to aggregate their favorite resources and publish them to the community site. There is a ning app called ‘Flink’ that lets people add/save/tag links in a del.icio.us-like way, and then the community can ‘favorite’ or ‘rate’ the links. This might be a great way to collect and display these resources. A robust enough repository might be a reason to keep coming back to the site again and again.

We are also looking into an app called ‘Sharendipity’ that lets people comment on images that have been uploaded. This might be a great way to crowdsource tutorials – if a tutorial creator uploads a series of annotated images, perhaps that tutorial can be open and editable by any other member. Tutorials could be ongoing ’social objects’ that are never quite finished.

We talked a bit about the purpose of our site. We agreed that the site should be for learning and fun, not for financial gain. We currently have two central concepts: contests and tutorials. The contests would be regular photoshop design competitions where participants would begin with the same template (.psd). The contests would differ in topic and scope – one might be an avatar, one might involve creating a webpage header, one might be a sample advertisement. We imagine a community voting platform would allow people to weigh in on what type of contests they would like to see next. Submissions would be rated by community members on quality of design and quality of design documentation – documenting the process that you went through to get to this final design.

This is where the tutorials might come in. One way to integrate the desktop photoshop application into this process would be a plugin that would let users ‘capture’ a moment in their creative process. Either as they work, or perhaps by looking back through their history file, they could ‘capture’ certain important moments, saving the project image and commands (the commands might be ’since last capture’ but this is still undetermined). They then might be able to upload the images and commands directly to the ning site, and annotate/fix the process as needed. Later, as others use the tutorial, they might find some portion of it confusing – they could either fix it themselves, or mark it as ‘needs to be fixed’ or ‘confusing.’

Tutorials and contest submissions should be tagged with keywords (cs3, cs4, drop shadow, etc) to support findability. If there is a forum, it should also be organized to support different levels of expertise, different types of questions, etc.

Finally, one of the most important things for our site is determining how to adequately motivate contribution to the site. The wikipedia ‘barnstar’ badges that we read about may be a good model. We need some kind of recognition tool to acknowledge the work that people are doing on the site; we will keep thinking about this.

Until our next meeting, we are exploring ning’s capabilities in more depth and testing out many of its applications.

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Interview Findings

By Adrienne | Published: January 27, 2010

Tutorial creating:

People are not opposed to creating their own tutorials, but they were not very excited about it.
There are so many online resources already available (youtube, “how to” via google search, specific sites), people worry that they wouldn’t have a unique contribution or wouldn’t be as helpful. (Option to upload anonymously may help with this lack of confidence.)
There was not a big concern about copyright issues with uploading content (1 person of 9 expressed some concern).
Tutorials need to have enough detail – we would need to determine what the right level of detail is, though. How many screenshots to include? How much description?

Search/help patterns

Once people have found a successful website/”tutor” they keep going back
Some people search for helpful tutorials or tips by user (within a help site) – they trust people who have submitted helpful content in the past.
The expertise level of posters and responders is important – help responses and tutorial contributions shouldn’t be over people’s head.
We need to be conscious of findability – helping people find what they are looking for, and offering many ways to get to information. This was a concern for novices – people don’t know how to find what they need, and they also had trouble ‘re-finding’ information they had found in the past.

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Interview Results

By Adrienne | Published: January 27, 2010

U01: Intermediate
U02: Advanced at Gimp
U03: Beginner/Intermediate
U04: Expert
U05: Advanced
U06: Expert
U07: Advanced/Expert
U08: Advanced
U09: Beginner

Gauging User Proficiency

1. What is your occupation?

U01: Student
U02: Electrical engineer
U03: College Student
U04: University of Arkansas undergrad student, Gallery Artist
U05: product specialist
U06: student
U07: student
U08: freelance commercial artist
U09: Teacher

2. Do you use Adobe Photoshop?

U01: Sometimes

U02: Gimp, not PS
U03: yeah, Photoshop
U04: I use photoshop cs 4, as well as corel painter, and sometimes illustrator.
U05: yes

U06: Yes
U07: Yes
U08: Yes

U09: Yes

3. How long have you used Photoshop?

U01: 3 years

U02: 10 years
U03: I’d say about a year
U04: I have been using photoshop since photoshop 6 came out, which was around 2000
U05: 14 years
U06: 12 years
U07: 7 years

U08: 9-10 years

U09: 4 years

4. Do you use it professionally? (v.s. hobby, class)

U01: no – hobby or class

U02: hobby
U05: yes
U06: yes
U07: yes

U08: yes

U09: no, use it for hobby

5. What do you use it for?

U01:pretty much just photos, image altering

U02: Photo editing, icons, screen captures, & other such projects. Not just photos from a camera
U03: photo touchups

U04: I mostly use these programs to do paintings or prepare reference photographs for a traditional art piece.
U05: photo editing , graphic design, mocks
U06: editing photos, making wireframes, interface design, flyers and graphics, used to make animations
U07: graphics for websites – non-vector stuff

U08: create websites graphics, mocking up images for the web, coloring illustrations, photo retouching
U09: layout of wedding album, invitation, cards-making

6. How often do you use Photoshop?

U01:about 1x/week
U02: 1x every 2 weeks
U03: Once a week or two, weekly
U04: It depends. I can spend around 6 hours in photoshop in a day or not use it for a few days. It mostly depends on what projects I have going on or if I am just doodling.
U05: once a week
U06: every day
U07: every day
U08: almost every time I turn on my computer, almost daily
U09: not often, depends on soclal functions

7. How would you rate your proficiency level in using Adobe Photoshop? (Would you say you are a…Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert?)

U01: Intermediate

U02: Advanced
U03: Beginner or Intermediate
U04: Expert, but there is always a lot to understand. (photoshop)
U05: Advanced
U06: Expert
U07:Advanced/expert
U08: Advanced
U09: Beginner

8. How confident are you using Photoshop? 0 to 10, 10 is most confident

U01: 4
U02: 7
U03: 6

U04: 10
U05: 9
U06: 10
U07: 9
U08: for what I use if for, I’m pretty confident – 7 or 8
U09: 3

9. Do you use other Adobe products? Which ones?

U01: Illustrator, Bridge, Acrobat reader
U02: n/a
U03: nope
U04: I have used dreamweaver, illustrator, bridge, and a few drawing programs.
U05: CS4 All
U06: Illustrator, flash, dreamweaver
U07: illustrator, indesign, acrobat
U08: I do. Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Image Ready, Director, trying to use Flash
U09: Illustrator, acrobat

Games

10. Do you participate in online games or contest? (Farmville, WoW) If so which ones? why?

U01: No

U02:No

U03: yeah, a little bit. console games and some pc games
U04: I play Counter strike 1.6 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
U05: no games
U06: yes – cafe world in facebook – you can manage your cafe, visit others’ cafes, give tips. i like it because it’s social. used to play racing and shooting games.
U07: not now, used to play kart rider
U08: contents – threadless, design by humans, pillteed.com. I do play online games that are usually not social – turret defense games, tower defense, a ninja game, online flash or shockwave games

U09: no

Learning

11. How did you learn? (classes, books, tutorials, friends?)

U01: I got a free trial and messed with it, did a little more in graphic design class

U02: Used photoshop for 4 years in high school so that was where I got initial training, Gimp is similar to photoshop but free so I started using it after I got out of school. Self taught using the Gimp website (gimp.org) which has tutorials, tips, etc

U03: online tutorials
U04: I first started out going to good-tuorials.com or something and other art websites such as conceptart.org or cgtalk.org and looked at tutorials and demos.

U05: Taught myself, learn by trying it out and read online, consult friends, purchased some books @ some point
U06: taught self, made posters for high school, learned from some books.
U07: self-taught, had to make poster project in college. learned from googling and tutorials.
U08: some success with all of the above. tutorials are usually not very good. books are usually more clear than a tutorial, but not my preferred because its difficult to jump around in or find a previously viewed spot. friends are always a good place to start, but there are drawbacks too. I’ve had good luck in classes.
U09: with a friend for 2 hours, then self learned through online tutorials and exploring photoshop

12. If you wanted to learn how to do something in Adobe Photoshop what would you do?

U01: go to youtube and look for videos, or google it
U02: Go to gimp.org, browse around – tutorials are most useful. They are static tutorials with screenshots and text, not videos usually. Leads you thru an example.

U03: a few sites. I usually just Google “photoshop tutorials”
U04: I would usually get on conceptart.org and use the search tool in the forums or just go to another digital art website.

U05: Search for it online, How to tutorials
U06: video tutorials in adobe design community are where i go
U07: youtube, google, i want to get access to lynda.com to learn more (thinks we have free access somewhere on campus, wants to go there because these tutorials are the best)
U09: Search online and ask for help, or ask a friend who is proficient

13. Were you successful?

U03: kinda. sometimes it’s hard to find what I want, so I mix and match tutorials
U04: Almost every time.
U05: Usually, if can’t figure it out- ask a friends (experienced)
U06: usually
U07:usually
U09: usually, not ambitious in using photoshop

14. What sites did you reference? Why?

U01: Don’t prefer any site in particular
U02: gimp.org, other than that might just google
U03: I don’t remember their names Laments: the sites didn’t have very good searching features. It seemed like just 50 tutorials thrown in there. If I couldn’t find stuff I’d just move on to the next site.
U04: conceptart.org, cgtalk.org, good-tutorials.com They have taught me everything I know about digital art, and more fine art as well. I have learned more from conceptart.org than any other schooling I have had.
U05: not that i can think of, “photoshop disasters” , don’t have one site in particular
U06: google, adobe
U07: google, tuts has good tutorials, lynda is good but costs a lot.
U08: I have a whole set of bookmarks of tutorials that I run accross. receive links from one guy I follow on twitter. Vectips.com is a good one that I know by name and go back to enough.

15. How did you learn about the site? What features do you like or dislike about them?

U02: gimp.org – tutorials and documentation are most useful.
U03:
U04: I found out about them simply by just looking for art websites years back when I started getting interested into digital art. Each website does and provides what it is supposed to be. The career I want to pursue may not be in the same subject matter of what is mostly on these websites but as far as the technical stuff and understand the art world I just soak it up.

What features are you expecting to find?

U05: What not to do, funny links
U08: think it was unsolicitedly spat at me through twitter, or though a search

16. What features do you expect to find? (or like/dislike?)

U03: good searching or help finding things

U04: Everything about art
U08: liked how it was organized, fairly easy to browse, not much clutter. the guy seems to have a fairly clear grasp of how to make sense, lots of screen shots, without going over the top, mix of thoroughness and conciseness, and generally being clear.

Contributors

Sharing:

17. How do you feel about sharing your work publicly online? What are your main concerns?

U01: No concerns, would want anyone to have access to it.

U02: No concerns, but wouldn’t be that motivated. I don’t think I would make anything anyone else would want to see.

U03: I’d be OK with it
U04: The way I see it, if anything is online its up for grabs. It just depends on the viewers own moral of what they do with your image. I want to share my work because it usually has a message behind it.
U05: main concern is with copyright, control who uses it and what they use it for, generally share most stuff (like photos)
U06: don’t mind but i don’t want to spend much time on it

U07: don’t feel that committed to the community, don’t know if i’d do it, but wouldn’t mind.

U08: i have mixed feelings. on the one hand i appreciate when people do it. but on the other hand, i don’t find that i do something that is super technically interesting. if i am doing something tricky, i feel that i am probably doing something in a very bassakwards way, that it wouldn’t be help to anyone that is learning.
U09: would not share information that she wouldn’t want to share

18. Would you be willing to upload your work to a community site?

U01: Yes, but I would only be motivated if I felt my work was strong – if I did something cool or if it would help someone. Might upload something to get help on it, but would be more likely to keep trying to mess with it myself.
U02: yes but…see above
U03: If I were confident enough I wouldn’t mind at all
U04: I do all the time. Doing so I have received critiques and alot of good feedback on how I can improve and also it is always good to hear that someone enjoys your work.
U05: Yes, flickr and facebook. photos yes, pictures for client- maybe not
U06: would need guidance on how many stages to add – could add 10 screenshots or 100 of the progress.
U07: seems like a lot of work to upload a tutorial
U08:some, but i would be pretty picky about what i did share. if i was a user of the site, i might be inclined to upload more. would be willing to share something simple. for instance i have a critique on threadless right now, and there is a tee-shirt texture over a design that makes it look like the design is on the tee-shirt, so its super simple, but people will ask how to do that.
U09: yes

19. If you wanted to do that right now what sites would you use to accomplish that?

U03: I’d just use google to find somewhere to post it.
U04: I would either put it up on youtube.com if it was a video recording of my desktop, upload pictures demos to photobucket.com or for photoshop files that are larger I could upload to rapidshare.com which is a very easy upload tool.
U05: Flickr

U08: don’t really know. some people do stuff like that in the blogs on threadless.
U09: don’t know

Tutorials:

20. Have you ever created/shared a tutorial online? (Any kind)

U03: nope
U04: Yes I have made simple walk-throughs but nothing too in depth.
U05: Yes, layer masks, 3D effects, posted on his own blog
U06: No
U07: No
U08: not with pictures, but i have created a tutorial about how to create a clickable url link. mostly because he was annoyed with people’s plain text links.
U09: no, don’t know enough

21. If so, talk about the process you went through to create the tutorial. How did you gather images? How did you decide how to structure the tutorial?

U01: No
U02: Yes – internal for intranet site @work. I went through all the steps, taking screenshots along the way to include. I wrote the text to go along with the screenshots. Put the final version up on a website or in a PDF that was linked from the site.
U04: I simply just put a bunch of pictures into one. Then I just put text next to each image explaining what is going on in that certain step.
U05: screenshots and wrote text , recorded actions, late 90s

21. Would you create a completely new project in order to assemble a tutorial, or would you create the tutorial only if you had already done all the work for another reason?

U01: n/a
U03: I would probably decide after the fact, “hey, that would make a cool tutorial”
U04: If I had multiple layers used in my project it would be easy to make a tutorial, but if I worked straight onto one canvas layer, then it would be more difficult. If I worked on one layer I would probably start a new and more focused tutorial on what I am trying to explain.
U05: no, considering how there is so much stuff out there
U06: don’t want to spend a lot of time on tutorials…
U07: ” ” “
U08:it depends on how infatuated I am with this community, but chances are I would not make something new unless it was really simple.

Community

22. What social networks are you a member of?

U01: Facebook, sometimes comment on blogs.
U02: Facebook, flickr, linkedin (“but i don’t know what the hell your’e supposed to do with linkedin”)
U03: facebook
U04: facebook.com, pluggedin.com
U05: facebook, flickr, google reader
U06: facebook, linkedin, twitter, lastfm
U07:facebook, linkedin, twitter
U08: facebook, twitter, myspace (technically), threadless, emttees.com, coroflot, behance.net, flickr, aim, blip.com, ffffound.com (image bookmarking), last.fm (but haven’t used it much), goodreads, LinkedIn, dyestat.com (running forum)
U09: facebook

23. Do you participate in any forums? Which?

U01: No
U02: Have in the past, for software used at work. newsgroup – help forum. post question, answer others’ questions.
U03: I read forums but I don’t participate in them. Sometimes gaming forums I post
U04: yes, conceptart.org and cgtalk.org
U05: Yes, geek stuff, techy, law school, business school.
U06: ux factory
U07:no
U08: threadless, emttees, dyestat, flickr
U09: teacher related, slick deals

24. Have you gotten help from user forums in the past? Talk about a time when you got help from a forum…what was good and what was bad about the experience?

U01: Have used Drupal forums. Good – lots of information. Bad – sometimes the response is over your head – level of expertise can vary and sometimes you would need a lot of expertise to even understand the answer (so expertise level of posters and responders is important)
U02: Good – lots of answers, lots of people monitor the forums. Bad: some stupid answers. Idiots offer advice. Some people want to seem knowledgeable or want to help for the sake of helping but they don’t really know how – or they answer a question other than the one you asked.
U03: The help I got wasn’t what I needed or I felt like the people weren’t inclined to be helpful
U04: A ton of help. They are better than teachers at my school.
U05: usually ask and ppl give advice – ask “how to” question , generally people are helpful, has not had a “bad” experience using forums
U06: video tutorials on help sites are good, but it’s annoying when you have to sit through the slow parts of the video. it’s’ good if they present all the info quickly and you can just watch the video lots of times if you need to. have gone to cooking forums too – they have a place where you can comment on each stage of a recipe. that is cool.
U07: gotten help from user forums/help forums – i like tutorials when they are step-by-step. it’s bad when they don’t give enough information, when they jump to another step without explaining what happened. that’s why video tutorials are good. some users put up really good tutorials and then i go back and search for them again, thinking that maybe they’ve put up something related to what i’m looking for (e.g. looks by user sometimes in addition to topic)
U08: Yes. I receive feedback and critique in flickr and threadless forums. On flickr, if there is any feedback beside “oh cool” it is usually helpful. In threadless, people are usually commenting so that they can spam you with their designs.
U09: