All in all

I have two close friends who both are artists.

The other one is red-green color blind. He is an illustrator and before he started working with Painter program he bought colors by their names (red-something and green-something) and told me how he used to place red and green colors to the opposite sides of his watercolor palett.
He can not see the difference, only the darkness-lightness values between anything concerning these color combinations. As he told me, the way he sees these missing colors are something between brown or gray. Even so this does not affect his art:

The other artist friend of mine has a glaucoma. He is trying to paint as much as he can before he becomes blind. Glaucoma cannot be cured. He tried the medication, but it did not help so now he is facing an operation in which they try to diminsh the pressure in his eye:

About Group 1's assignments:

Visual Attention we did babdly: we just chose of the six topics two to each, and it was a bad thing since they all are related to each other. It was clearly a textbook thing and we could have got further – maybe – together.

With the other assigment Local Environment it was easier to divide who does what.
My concern was the mapping in the way the client wanted: as a blanket. The client wants two colors: green and red. I had tried all color combinations as the Global Environment group had done: from red to yellow to green with through yellow.
I knew there has to be a more simple way of doing it: there cannot be more than two colors. To keep things simple for the user: KISS-rule. So I talked the members of our group as well as the client to have the other color black. What is the good color then?

I understand the point red: alert!!! But I put black first. Yes, a negative color, but maybe we change into some other by showing a point, by making see there is as something else?

Why black is worst is because painters for some time have used to represent bad. There are examples from Soviet posters (Potjmekin) or Picasso's poster where the pigeon flies over the black guns with the green olive leave in  its mouth. These are the colors that we understand in our culture, also green is the color to which a human vision is most perceptive of.

I could of course wonder largelly of all the mathemaical equations about color, but since I'm not in to that I just wish you all

Merry Christmas and thank you all especially Markku for the great course

See you next year

The final presentation

Rate your environment 
our 2nd presentation

This is our 2nd also the final presentation. There is still room for improvement. Hope the current problems can be fixed in the DVD2 in spring.

Joy the app and welcome any comments!

Questions discussed in our presentation

At the end our our concept presentation we presented some questions that we discussed with our contact person from the ministry on Friday. After our discussion we have a pretty good view on how we are going to proceed.

The questions we presented and the answers to those are presented below.

1) How to show detailed results on the map?

How to indicate to the user what location you have chosen to view, if you cannot display information based on named areas? E.g. “Chosen location” vs. “Helsinki, Finland”
--> We won't show the user the name of the place (s)he has chosen, but will rely on their knowledge of geography. We will also display the names of major cities on the map (similar to google earth, for example).

What is the most user friendly way to move from the map view to viewing detailed results? So when will the clickable symbols appear, and from which range will reviews be displayed from?
We have been benchmarking different solutions in for example hotel booking portals and the Urban Mediator app that was recommended for us to check out. We haven't found out what the best solution would be yet, but decided to try to discuss with people who have experience in creating similar apps right when the spring's course has started, and we know what kind of resources we have during the spring.

2) Color schemes? 

Are we going to separate the expert data from common user data by using different color schemes? If so, how does the user understand the idea?
We will be using the same color schemes for both reviews, displaying them in the same view. The expert data is different from the common user's opinions essentially because this data is from country level, but it will be good to have at lest some data in the beginning, so the results section isn't completely empty, and all parts of the world have been rated at least once.

3) Logging in?

To view “my review history”, the user has to be log in. Also, (s)he has to be logged in for the ratings to appear here. At which point is the user offered the opportunity to log in?
The user will be asked to log in only when trying to access the "review history" section. This is not relevant to those users who do not want to record their own review history, but may be an interesting option for frequent users.

At this point, we have a pretty good idea on how were going to proceed next year. Only thing we need now is more information on next years course, e.g. what kind of resources and time frame we are going to have. No one of our group knows how to code, which will surely make things more difficult.

Concept presentation

Last week, we presented our concept to both our client on Monday, and our classmates on Thursday. What was really positive was that our contact person from the ministry of environment seemed to be very pleased with our presentation. The only major thing he wanted to change was moving from an area based thinking into location based thinking. This means, that we wouldn't give the user the chance to rate a certain city, like Helsinki, or a part of the city, like Arabia in Helsinki, but instead we should just ask him to rate his current location within a 1 km range.

This proved to be really problematic to change by our thursday's presentation, and resulted in some critique about the user friendliness of the app. I perfectly understand this critique, since we were struggling with this problem quite a bit, and it was good to hear that others had similar thoughts to ours. I was a little disappointed though that we didn't receive that much of constructive criticism, or ideas on how this could work better, but we were only told that this doesn't quite work. Which we already knew. This is also our fault, since we failed to send the presentation to our opponents in time, which was partly due to lack of information, and partly due to the changes we still had to make after discussing with the client on Monday.

So what we will have to do, is to really think about this location vs. area thing, and hopefully talk to a person with more experience on GIS systems. What makes this problem really tricky is that whichever solution we decide to go with, it should be applied consistently throughout the app, so both in the review tool, and in the results tool.

Overall, the presentation to our class gave some valuable ideas on what we will have to develop further, but I have to say that most comments were about the exactly same things we already had considered, over and over, and didn't help us get any closer to a solution. At this point, perhaps we would have needed a more in depth discussion with someone who has experience from building an app like this. The suggestion to discuss with the research group responsible for creating the urban mediator app was really helpful, and we might also contact the GIS department in Otaniemi. I met one of their professors Paula Ahonen-Rainio a few weeks ago when she was giving a guest lecture on cartography at our school, and she seemed really interested in helping us find the GIS knowledge we need to further develop this app. There apparently is a whole master's degree program dedicated to GIS systems in Otaniemi, so perhaps we could find someone from there to help us in the app development during spring, if needed. We currently have no info on the spring's course, so it's hard to plan that far ahead yet.

We will meet with the client again tomorrow. We will go through the same questions we presented in our presentation, and hopefully agree that the next step is to consult people with more expertise on our subject.