This whole course has really opened my eyes and vision to the world of user experience design. UX design can’t be summarised in any number of words to do it full justice. It can only be attained through trial and error, with the target consumers in mind when designing anything.
A very important premise to designing a good experience which I have taken away from this course is that of user research. It is not just about number crunching and plain old surveys. Rather, its about getting to know your users, how they operate in their environment (not in a lab) and what they like or dislike. It is like getting to know your friends or close ones better. One of the assignments that we did included a ethnographic study, where we had to crash in on a lecture without anyone knowing that we are actually there to study their behaviours and actions during the class. The experience was totally different from any other researches that I have done before. This time round, I had to blend into the environment, observing the people around in their natural settings. I could not talk, ask questions or whatever in that environment; all I could do was sit and observe. It was really interesting that by just sitting and observing, my team could come up with so many conclusions that we might never have gotten from surveys.
Final Project
The final project was a daunting one for everyone of us I reckon. There was a large amount of freedom afforded to us to choose and create a user experience for any target audience. We decided on improving and inculcating the Kumon spirit for Kumon by designing a learning portal for the students. During the course of this project, we had to do numerous interviews, observations and researches. Drawing from what we have learnt in class, methods such as card sorting and usability settings, we were able to design and come up with a product that will be of interest to our target students.
Through our user research, we realised that no two persons are the same; one child may like the design very much but the other would not. We could not please every child with one type of design and feel of our learning portal. Further consultations with Mr Reddy got us to the conclusion that we had to design not for the masses, but for a specific portion of users.
No one research study is final; there are always things to improve at every session. However, it is important to capture the attention of your target audience and please them on the most basic level. The other parts of the design will take time and more user research to reach perfection.
User Interface
After we got the general look and feel of our portal out, we had to move on to the user interface portion. The user interface is a very important part of the entire user experience design of an interactive product. Although a good UI is often times overlooked by the users (because they are so intuitive that it seems to be second nature to the user), the importance of it cannot be stressed enough. Times when the UI is being noticed by a user is when it is badly designed, so much so that it affects and protrudes out to the user when he/she is using the product to warrant such notice. We opted for a click only interface, with the exception of the entering of data such as keying in the username and password at the start. This created a uniform feel for the user interface throughout.
Final Thoughts
Finally, I would like to add that user research is no doubt important, but in choosing our research subjects, we are already practicing a sort of bias. We think that they belong to a group of people that we are trying to target and customise our software to. What happens if they are not really part of our target group? I guess there’s no absolute objectiveness in user research; as such, it is just best to concentrate on a specific group of people that we think would best suit the current project. We can’t please everyone, can we? :D
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