First, I’m a computer game player so when Jamie and I were discussing what to design as the final project, I suggested that we could design something for gamers. I have lots of friends through games so I went to ask them what troubles they had met during playing computer games. Then I found that most of my friends and I all faced one problem that sometimes when we are playing computer games, we were not able to find out the CPU temperature of the computer is so high that does harm to the computers. We can only notice this by feeling the keyboards are extremely hot. However, if the gamers use external keyboards, it is less possible for them to notice that before the CPU temperature hurts the computers. Even then they want to turn on the external fans to cool down the CPU, they must stop their games. Also, sometimes if the web environment is not good, gamers need to pay more attention to the number of PING to figure out whether their website environment is good or not. These will interrupt and disturb their game process and may even make some gamers get crazy because the poor PING will lead the games laggy and sluggish.
Then I found an article on ZhiHu about “InkCase”. This is a phone case and it has some information on it, such as the weather, the steps you walk today and today’s schedule. The screen is as same as Kindle, so the users don’t need to touch the screen to awake the InkCase. This means whenever you want to check the information, it is available and concise. In addition, from the in-class discussion—design your partner’s project, my partner gave me some suggestion that it can also have the functions similar to Siri.
So we decided to design a project with responsible design agenda and problem-solving goal. First, the appearance of this project is decided to be similar to our inspiration—“InkCase”. It should be a pad with a screen. Then I suggested that the information on the screen should be concise. It is designed for computer-games players. They have little time to read everything on the screen. So we only chose two data, one is the CPU temperature and the other is PING, the value calculates the web environment. It is also not concise enough because the players may have more direct feedbacks by distinguishing the colors. So we used the change of colors to tell the users how about the data currently. If the colors go deeper, the users should have warned. Furthermore, as mentioned above, turning on the external fans will cost players’ time, so we design to connect the watchpad with the external fans. When the CPU temperature is higher than 75 centigrades, the fans will be turned on automatically by WatchPad.
Then my friend raised a question during our design, he thought this project is useless if the users are not playing the computers. In order to make it more attractive, we designed the second interface. It has the functions as same as Siri and also has daily information on it.
After the presentation, we heard lots of advice and comments from the peer. This project needs more improvement, such as more feedbacks from game players. Also, as one of the professors mentioned, if the Ping is high, the users may have no method to handle it so beeping is unnecessary this time and may even interrupt the gamers. In addition, this project may not be based on the pad maybe can be added to the mouse or above the computer screens.
I think this project is successful because of its concise interfaces and useful functions. Game players have not been cared enough in China and some people may even use backward devices. Our goal is to make the game players more convenience during playing computer games. Playing computer games or loving playing them are never incorrect things and we hope the players can play better with this project.