Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab Week 1

 One week and three lectures in to the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab, it's turning out to be a very interesting set of first lectures.

I'm posting my takeaways from the lectures and how it means to my ideas.

Lecture 1: Aza Raskin, Founder of Massive Health

Aza's lectures reminded me of the importance of two things:

1. The value of communicating ideas effectively
2. The importance of solving the right problems

For the first point, I picked up from Aza how prototypes (like paper sketches and wireframes) give the audience of your idea something tangible. As he said, to the users, the interface is the product.

The second point is more on staying focus to your design objective and problem. I can relate this to a quote by Steve Jobs saying it's better to focus on one or two things and be extremely good at it. This philosophy shows how Apple rarely strays from solving the right problems.

It also reminded of laying down specific design problems for my future ideas.

Lecture 2: Burt Herman, Founder of Storify

If there's a key phrase I picked up from Burt's talk, it's "Minimum Viable Product." (Which ironically appeared in the text chat from the learning lab participants.)

There's value in finding out through feedback what's enough to make ideas fly. Relating this to Aza's point in finding the right problem, this tempers our tendencies to dilute ideas and products with cool, but inessential features.

Lecture 3: Amanda Cox, Graphics Editor at the New York Times

Although optional, I wanted to attend this as one of my design ideas dealt with infographics.

Amanda's lecture tied her team's data visualization work at the New York Times with key concepts in data visualization. She shared that context and the people's good old "what's in it for me?" thinking are elements of compelling visualizations and infographics.

My idea

Putting the three lectures together, here's a revised prototype of the Wikified News Dashboard:

I addressed some of the things I realized needed tweaking:

• Needs to give quick information about the news - At the very least, the page will answer What, Who, When, How, and Why right off the bat
• Easier contributions - I temporarily placed a contribution area above the fold, although I think this will be tweaked in future iterations

What do you think of the revised version?



Tags: Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab