CAST 2014

When you decide which seat to take at a conference, you are designing your experience. When you re-do your home office or draft an artsy email, you are designing. In this sense, everyone is a designer. Have you ever entered a room in a new office block and started to look for switches. Were you able to switch on the right light on the first attempt? Did you blame yourself for the failure? If you did, you became a victim of false blame, cursing yourself for poor design of products. Testers must be aware of the psychology behind design of products. Design concepts like affordances, signifiers and gulfs of execution can help testers in testing products better. In today’s world, where designers and testers often work in silos, Parimala speaks about how working together can lead to not just designing explorable systems, but testing them effectively by highlighting feedback and visibility. Key takeaways include understanding design case studies, being aware of design and learning concepts like design thinking and natural mappings.