Blog 6 What was the most compelling/surprising/interesting/useful concept I learned in CSC318? Why?

There were many interesting concepts taught in this course, I realise I started being more analytical when i see poorly designed UI around just about everywhere i go. I think this is good as I am putting what i learned to use in real life and it could strengthen my idea of what a good design is all about, having the user as the first priority. However, one of the topic got me the most intrigued would be the part on memory. This is because not only could this be applied to this course and UI/UX but this could be applied to many other situations, namely, studying for tests. I found it very interesting as Velian tells us many different aspects of memory. 2 of the topics i found particularly interesting is how experts such as chess masters can use a schema for efficient storage, instead of remember piece by piece they remember the board as one piece which saves a lot of memory space. Moreover, they are able to do this because of practice proving practice does help with memorizing things. Another idea Velian talked about was the mental maps that helps memorizing things, I think this could really help with memorizing information for exams as a student. One more interesting topic that Velian talked about during the memory slides was the gaming aspect of it. The arrow pointing down to tell the user the units moved in RTS game as it could have delay communicating with the servers was very interesting. I use to think that it was just a design to have the units respond when its clicked and have the arrow down to show that it is walking there. But now I know its more than that, it was a smart way for designers to let the users know that it is about to move to reduce confusion on the user end.

All in all, I thought taught me alot of interesting concepts, many to do with human behaviour. This can potentially help me in the future with whatever i take on, not only on the technology side of things.