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Cheat Sheet - Font Terms by Heather Truckenmiller December 27, 2020 0 Comments A Printable Cheat Sheet Of Font Terms, and a second sheet, showing the difference between using system fonts in Design Space, compared to other programs. System Design Cheat Sheet – Drive-in Rack. Download the Document. System Design Cheat Sheet – Cantilever Rack. Download the Document. Want to Get in Touch? Design Patterns Cheat Sheet Chain of Responsibility Avoids coupling the sender of a request to its receiver by giving more than one object a chance to handle the request Client ConcreteHandler1 +HandleRequest Handler +HandleRequest ConcreteHandler2 +HandleRequest Command Encapsulates a request as an object, thereby letting you. Android provides three system themes: Holo Light; Holo Dark; Holo Light with dark action bar; Sources and useful links: Themes, Holo Everywhere. Naming conventions Naming conventions for drawables. File names must contain only lowercase a-z, 0-9, or. The C Cheat Sheet An Introduction to Programming in C Revision 1.0 September 2000 Andrew Sterian Padnos School of Engineering Grand Valley State University.

Summary: User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep product-development efforts on the right track, in agreement with true user needs and not imaginary ones.

One of the questions we get the most is, “When should I do user research on my project?” There are three different answers:

• Do user research at whatever stage you’re in right now. The earlier the research, the more impact the findings will have on your product, and by definition, the earliest you can do something on your current project (absent a time machine) is today.
• Do user research at all the stages. As we show below, there’s something useful to learn in every single stage of any reasonable project plan, and each research step will increase the value of your product by more than the cost of the research.
• Do most user research early in the project (when it’ll have the most impact), but conserve some budget for a smaller amount of supplementary research later in the project. This advice applies in the common case that you can’t get budget for all the research steps that would be useful.

The chart below describes UX methods and activities available in various project stages.

Each project is different, so the stages are not always neatly compartmentalized. The end of one cycle is the beginning of the next.

The important thing is not to execute a giant list of activities in rigid order, but to start somewhere and learn more and more as you go along.

When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating methods each product cycle because they are aimed at different goals and types of insight. The chart below shows how often UX practitioners reported engaging in these methods in our survey on UX careers.

If you can do only one activity and aim to improve an existing system, do qualitative (think-aloud) usability testing, which is the most effective method to improve usability. If you are unable to test with users, analyze as much user data as you can. Data (obtained, for instance, from call logs, searches, or analytics) is not a great substitute for people, however, because data usually tells you what, but you often need to know why. So use the questions your data brings up to continue to push for usability testing.

Discover

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need. It’s especially important to do discovery activities before making a new product or feature, so you can find out whether it makes sense to do the project at all.

An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you’re working with an existing product or service.

Good things to do during discovery:

• Conduct field studies and interview users: Go where the users are, watch, ask, and listen. Observe people in context interacting with the system or solving the problems you’re trying to provide solutions for.
• Run diary studies to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.
• Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints.
• Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?
• Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff?
• Do competitive testing. Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

Explore

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.

• Compare features against competitors.
• Do design reviews.
• Use research to build user personas and write user stories.
• Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort.
• Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like.
• Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain.
• Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid groupthink and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them.
• Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don’t gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again.
• Use card sorting to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme.

Test

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

• Do qualitative usability testing. Test early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access.
• Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies.
• Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems.
• Talk with user groups.
• Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints.
• Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team.
• Do benchmark testing: If you’re planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time.

Listen

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends.

• Survey customers and prospective users.
• Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress.
• Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information.
• Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can’t find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects.
• Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent.
• Run booths at conferences that your customers and users attend so that they can volunteer information and talk with you directly.
• Give talks and demos: capture questions and concerns.

Activities

Discover

Ongoing and strategic activities can help you get ahead of problems and make systemic improvements.

• Find allies. It takes a coordinated effort to achieve design improvement. You’ll need collaborators and champions.
• Talk with experts. Learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Get advice from people with more experience.
• Follow ethical guidelines. The UXPA Code of Professional Conduct is a good starting point.
• Involve stakeholders. Don’t just ask for opinions; get people onboard and contributing, even in small ways. Share your findings, invite them to observe and take notes during research sessions.
• Hunt for data sources. Be a UX detective. Who has the information you need, and how can you gather it?
• Determine UX metrics. Find ways to measure how well the system is working for its users.

Explore

• Follow Tog's principles of interaction design.
• Use evidence-based design guidelines, especially when you can’t conduct your own research. Usability heuristics are high-level principles to follow.
• Design for universal access. Accessibility can’t be tacked onto the end or tested in during QA. Access is becoming a legal imperative, and expert help is available. Accessibility improvements make systems easier for everyone.
• Give users control. Provide the controls people need. Choice but not infinite choice.
• Prevent errors. Whenever an error occurs, consider how it might be eliminated through design change. What may appear to be user errors are often system-design faults. Prevent errors by understanding how they occur and design to lessen their impact.
• Improve error messages. For remaining errors, don’t just report system state. Say what happened from a user standpoint and explain what to do in terms that are easy for users to understand.
• Provide helpful defaults. Be prescriptive with the default settings, because many people expect you to make the hard choices for them. Allow users to change the ones they might need or want to change.
• Check for inconsistencies. Work-alike is important for learnability. People tend to interpret differences as meaningful, so make use of that in your design intentionally rather than introducing arbitrary differences. Adhere to the principle of least astonishment. Meet expectations instead.
• Map features to needs. User research can be tied to features to show where requirements come from. Such a mapping can help preserve design rationale for the next round or the next team.
• When designing software, ensure that installation and updating is easy. Make installation quick and unobtrusive. Allow people to control updating if they want to.
• When designing devices, plan for repair and recycling. Sustainability and reuse are more important than ever. Design for conservation.
• Avoid waste. Reduce and eliminate nonessential packaging and disposable parts. Avoid wasting people’s time, also. Streamline.
• Consider system usability in different cultural contexts. You are not your user. Plan how to ensure that your systems work for people in other countries. Translation is only part of the challenge.
• Look for perverse incentives. Perverse incentives lead to negative unintended consequences. How can people game the system or exploit it? How might you be able to address that? Consider how a malicious user might use the system in unintended ways or to harm others.
• Consider social implications. How will the system be used in groups of people, by groups of people, or against groups of people? Which problems could emerge from that group activity?

Test

• Protect personal information. Personal information is like money. You can spend it unwisely only once. Many want to rob the bank. Plan how to keep personal information secure over time. Avoid collecting information that isn’t required, and destroy older data routinely.
• Keep data safe. Limit access to both research data and the data entrusted to the company by customers. Advocate for encryption of data at rest and secure transport. A data breach is a terrible user experience.
• Deliver both good and bad news. It’s human nature to be reluctant to tell people what they don’t want to hear, but it’s essential that UX raise the tough issues. The future of the product, or even the company, may depend on decisionmakers knowing what you know or suspect.
• Track usability over time. Use indicators such as number and types of support issues, error rates and task completion in usability testing, and customer satisfaction ratings, to show the effectiveness of design improvements.
• Include diverse users. People can be very different culturally and physically. They also have a range of abilities and language skills. Personas are not enough to prevent serious problems, so be sure your testing includes as wide a variety of people as you can.
• Track usability bugs. If usability bugs don’t have a place in the bug database, start your own database to track important issues.

Listen

• Pay attention to user sentiment. Social media is a great place for monitoring user problems, successes, frustrations, and word-of-mouth advertising. When competitors emerge, social media posts may be the first indication.
• Reduce the need for training. Training is often a workaround for difficult user interfaces, and it’s expensive. Use training and help topics to look for areas ripe for design changes.
• Communicate future directions. Customers and users depend on what they are able to do and what they know how to do with the products and services they use. Change can be good, even when disruptive, but surprise changes are often poorly received because they can break things that people are already doing. Whenever possible, ask, tell, test with, and listen to the customers and users you have. Consult with them rather than just announcing changes. Discuss major changes early, so what you hear can help you do a better job, and what they hear can help them prepare for the changes needed.
• Recruit people for future research and testing. Actively encourage people to join your pool of volunteer testers. Offer incentives for participation and make signing up easy to do via your website, your newsletter, and other points of contact.

Conclusion

Use this cheat-sheet to choose appropriate UX methods and activities for your projects and to get the most out of those efforts. It’s not necessary to do everything on every project, but it’s often helpful to use a mix of methods and tend to some ongoing needs during each iteration.

Related article: When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

Download

Whether you’re a professional landscaper or want to irrigate your own yard, this free Landscape Sprinkler System Design Tutorial is designed to take you step-by-step through the process of creating a professional-quality sprinkler irrigation plan, layout, or drawing.

There are lots of Sprinkler Design Guides, Why This one?

• This tutorial works with ALL sprinkler products and does not base your design on the use of a single manufacturer or store’s products. Most tutorials will force you into using specific products on your plan. Sometimes they are good products, sometimes not. Bonus: This tutorial will teach you how to spot the really bad irrigation products.
• This tutorial assumes you know nothing about irrigation and breaks it all down for you (but the beginner stuff is easily skimmed over for those more experienced.)
• This tutorial is multi-level. Many of the topics start with a outline of the topic, then expand on that outline in detail for those who need more explanation. Finally some subjects then move on to cover special situations or layout that are not “typical” for those who need that additional insight. So while some tutorial pages are long, you may not need to actually read a lot of it. Unless you are a future irrigation professional and interested in learning all about irrigation, which leads us to the next point…
• This guide is complete. It is used by colleges to teach irrigation design courses, and we encourage that use. However, it is written using 6th grade level English, so don’t panic. If you were ever a broke college student you can probably appreciate the idea of a free online textbook! Speaking of free…
• This tutorial is free. Yes there are some ads, along with a few “tips” they pay the cost of keeping it online. The ads on this site are low key. No flashing ads, no pop-ups (except the “we use cookies” pop-up notice that is required by law.)
• If you have a well and/or pump this is one of the only sprinkler system design guides available anywhere (including those $$$ books for sale at stores) that will show you how to correctly design your system so that it will not destroy your pump by making it cycle or run dry.
• Thousands of people have used this tutorial to create their irrigation systems drawings. This tutorial has been online a while, the first version was written back in 1995. You may find an error or two in it (especially in the grammar, it was written by an irrigation expert, not an English major) but most of the technical errors have been found and corrected long ago. Tons of feedback have resulted in rewrites of the parts that were not clear. The advantage of being online is that the tutorial does get constantly updated to incorporate new products, ideas, and methods.
• This tutorial was written by a professional irrigation designer and licensed landscape architect who has over 35 years experience designing irrigation for everything from small tract yards to golf courses. More on the author at the bottom of this page.

Warning: There are lots of online tutorials and this one may not be your choice and that’s fine. However there are a number of design guides around, both online and in stores, that use outdated design methods. Please watch out for these major design errors that may lead to very expensive repairs:

System Analysis And Design Cheat Sheet

• Beware of measuring flow with a bucket or gauge. The “GPM” value for your new sprinkler system should be based on the size of the existing water supply pipe running to your house. Some do-it-yourself sprinkler system guides have you measure water flow by turning on an existing faucet and timing how long it takes to fill a bucket. Some also suggest using a special gauge that measures the flow. Regardless of how you measure the flow, we now know that just measuring the flow from a faucet results in major errors that can result in your using a irrigation system flow that is way too high for your house’s plumbing to handle. When you turn on a faucet the water from it will often flow out at a rate that is way higher than what is safe for the pipe’s in your house. While running water for a few minutes at this flow to fill a bucket is relatively harmless, running a sprinkler system at that flow on a regular basis is not. This unsafe high flow results in “water hammer” and “scrubbing” damage to the pipes, two very expensive problems that can destroy the pipes in your house. We are talking thousands of dollars to re-pipe your house! The key here is that when determining the water supply volume the pipe size must be a factor considered.
• Sprinklers should have almost 100% overlap. If a sprinkler layout guide shows you coverage arcs that are not going almost all the way from one sprinkler to the next it is based on the old way of doing things back before we had low-flow sprinklers to conserve water. Almost all experts now agree that there should be near 100% overlap of sprinklers. Back in the old days we just told people with dry spots to run the sprinklers longer. That over-watered 90% of the lawn but it greened up the dry spots. We now know it wastes water and even worse, over-watering causes lots of landscape diseases!

All the information you need to create a sprinkler system design for your lawn, shrubs or garden is in this landscape sprinkler design manual. Illustrations, charts and spreadsheets will help explain and simplify the sprinkler irrigation design process. You will learn about lawn sprinklers, shrub sprinklers, and how to select a quality sprinkler head. Automatic and manual valves, controllers/timers, and the basic hydraulics that apply to watering systems are also covered.

Most of the pages of the tutorial are written as stand-alone articles, so that they will be useful to those who do a search for specific information. For this reason there is a small amount of repetitive material throughout the tutorial.

Landscape Sprinkler Irrigation Design Tutorial
Table of Contents

Don’t panic! It looks like a lot to cover, but much of it you will skim over because it applies only to very specific situations that don’t matter for most sprinkler systems. (But if it turns out one of those specific situations applies to YOU won’t you be glad that we included it?) You will find that the tutorial goes quickly once you get started. Just take it step-by-step and it is easy.

• Start Here! Introduction to Irrigation Design: How to use this tutorial, information on software programs to design your sprinkler system, and a few suggestions on those “free designs” offered by the sprinkler manufacturing companies.
• Step #1 Collect Information:
  • Measure Your Yard: How to measure your yard easily and accurately for your sprinkler irrigation system.
  • Measuring your water supply (critical that it be done right! One size does NOT fit all.):
    • City-Slicker Water: How to find the PSI and GPM if you get your water through a pipe from a water-company.
    • Country-Bumpkin Water: How to find the PSI and GPM if you pump water from a well, creek, lake, etc..
    • Backwoods Water: How to measure the GPM and PSI for other types of water supplies (Moses would use this section).
• Step #2 Select Your Equipment:
  • Selecting Your Sprinkler Equipment: Pressure loss is the key to selecting sizes!
    • Water Meter: Water meters.
    • Backflow Preventer: How to select a backflow preventer. Do you savor the flavor of dog pee? Nope? You want to get this right!
    • Mainlines: What type of pipe to use and how to calculate pressure loss in an irrigation system mainline.
    • Valves: Types of irrigation valves.
    • Elevation Pressure Loss: How to calculate pressure variations in your irrigation system that are caused by elevation changes.
    • Sprinkler Heads: How to select the best sprinkler heads for your needs. How to avoid the ones that aren’t so hot.
    • Laterals: Type of pipe to use between the valves and sprinkler heads which are called “lateral” pipes.
    • Types of Sprinkler Risers: How to connect your sprinklers to the lateral pipes. Get this wrong and your yard will look like Yellowstone with all the geysers shooting water in the air!
  • Adjustments: Making pressure loss adjustments to balance the system. Boring but very important if you want the sprinklers to actually spray correctly.
• Step #3Figure Out Sprinkler Head Locations: How to determine the correct sprinkler spacing, and which nozzles to use. Where to place the sprinkler heads. The rules on this have changed since the 70’s when a lot of the guidelines online were written. New low water sprinklers make sprinkler layout much more critical. You get this wrong, you get dry spots!
• Step #4 Create Valve Zones and Draw in Pipes: Identify hydro-zones, create valve zones, draw in the sprinkler pipe routes.
• Step #5 Lateral Pipe Sizes: How to calculate the size for each lateral pipe in the irrigation system. There’s no easy way for this one and lots of bad advice on pipe sizes in Internet help forums and the aisles of your local big box hardware store.
• Finished!Some Tips. Automation, Freeze Protection, Costs, Contractors, and of course a whole tutorial on Do-It-Yourself Installation without winding up in the hospital.

The pages of the sprinkler system design tutorial follow in logical order. To work your way through the entire irrigation design tutorial, simply select “Next Page” when you finish each page. Please take a moment to review the terms and conditions of this website and tutorial- click here for Terms and Conditions.

About the Author:

Software Architecture Patterns Cheat Sheet

So I guess if you’re still with me I’ll switch to first person and introduce myself. My name is Jess Stryker. Unless noted, I am the author of what you are reading on this website. I am a California registered Landscape Architect and opened my own irrigation design firm in 1980. I’ve designed thousands of irrigation systems for everything from little squares of grass in a tiny yard to huge shopping centers, regional parks, and golf courses. Much of my work has been for other Landscape Architects who hired me for tricky projects that required a high level of expertise. In my early years I also did a lot of design for agricultural irrigation systems, like pastures, orchards, vineyards, even dust control and cooling sprinklers for poultry. I’m retired now, which means I’m not interested in designing your irrigation system. I’ve designed enough sprinkler systems for a lifetime! This website is a means of passing along what I’ve learned over the years, and keeping a toe in the irrigation water (pun intended.)

The Sprinkler Design Tutorial began in 1995 during a business slow down. I started writing it not really knowing what I would do with it once it was finished. Shortly thereafter the Internet started to catch on. Back then the Internet was mostly educational works (and porn I suppose) and I figured the tutorial would be a good (education not porn!!!) match, so I put it online. It rapidly grew as I added more and more tutorials and articles on other irrigation topics. (I’ve kept porn off it with one notable exception in the early 2000’s when a link was hijacked and I didn’t catch it for a few days.)

I apologize in advance for my warped sense of humor, which you have already encountered and are about to get a lot more of if you continue. Hopefully it breaks the boredom even if it is just to let out a groan. I hope you enjoy this free tutorial and that you learn a lot from it!

System Design Interview Practice

This tutorial is only the tip of the iceberg! Use the links on the website home page to find tutorials and articles on just about everything irrigation related. Water filters, pump systems, irrigation scheduling, winterizing, repairs, and much more. Plus there are a few product reviews of some of the most common sprinkler system components.

By using this tutorial you agree to be bound by the conditions and limitations listed on the disclaimer page.