Post-module thoughts...

Overall I think this module is on the right track. I find the approaches that we took since early in this module very helpful in trying to set up some kind of a framework to help designers evoke the desired emotions out of whatever product they are designing. The theories on design models such as emotional probes and Jordan’s four pleasure analyses really served as useful framework on user behavior, and the early assignments served as a good exercise to think about some of the ways in which values and pleasure were perceived. For one it actually helped me understand, as a user, on why certain design appeals to me or what kind of values I am deriving out of any particular product. Still, I felt that these frameworks rely very much our interpretation of what our target user would be like, and therefore vulnerable to overgeneralization and misinterpretation. Particularly on the four analysis assignment, I found it hard to design a product benefit specifications based on purely the need analysis without taking into consideration other factors such as taste, aesthetics preference etc.

The ethnographical approach also was a bit limiting in terms of how we could derive useful design ideas, because first of all, all the bits of pieces of information coming from all over the place are hard to quantify, and secondly, we’re making too many assumptions about the conditions in which people operate certain activities. For instance, in our improving learning experience for lecture theatres, it was difficult to gauge what really makes up a good learning experience and whether the technology (in this case, the Lecture theatres) was a great factor which determines that experience.

Some of the lessons from marketing and branding that were covered also helped us understand how they influence the user’s perception of products. Although, I feel that in practice, when it comes to designing products, it is very hard to take into consideration things such as branding because again, branding is a value system which is based on what the stakeholders (or what Christopher Fahey’s article mentioned as the ‘bosses’,) say what it is, which makes it hard to try to map it to what the user might perceive about the product concerned.

For our final project, we sort of tried to put some of the theories and frameworks into practice when we’re designing the product specifications, and I think we managed to get quite a round up specifications based on our user research. We didn’t realize how big of a project our product ended up to be, therefore although the tools that we employed during the iterative design process such as the card sorting, information architecture and prototyping were very helpful to put things into perspective, at the end, because of the limited time, we really didn’t have the chance to properly iterate the design process and we kind of closed off incoming design ideas due to the feature creep that we experienced out of the feedback from all the usability testing that we conducted. In fact I would say towards the end, the focus kind of shift into getting the usability right and kind of neglecting the other emotional user experience part of it. I guess this is how it is in the real world, but perhaps in the future, the final project should be initiated earlier so that students have time to reiterate the design process while still leave some time to think about the greater issue of user experience.

I think this module is tacking one of the most difficult issues out there, which is trying to define what experience is, and how to design it. The issue is that we’re not dealing with hard sciences where everything is measurable, but rather something more subjective and unquantifiable such as pleasure and other emotions. But overall, this module provided me with very good groundings and exposure over the issues of UX while giving me opportunity to experience the challenging process of designing UX.

Final Project Phase 4

 

The above slides encapsulates some of the paper prototyping that we did.

Reflections on article:User Research Smoke & Mirrors (Christopher Fahey, 2006)

The article highlighted a couple of very important issues pertaining to the design process of experiential products such as websites or other interactive products.

The first is of course the tendency of designers making “scientific” user research the very foundation of their design process. The example on the use of eye tracking as a design tool is a classic example of trying to derive something empirical out of the experience of browsing a website. By measuring where users’ eyes were pointing for the longest time during a page-view, the hope is that an analysis of the subjective experience can be derived and such can be used as a design guideline. I guess the problem with such approach is that you are trying to measure experience by very narrow parameters such as user’s eye focus point, and neglecting other possible parameters which constitute the overall visual pleasure. For instance, just like what we went through in NM2208, things such as color, typology, layout and visual flow equally determine the psychology of perception, cognition and visual aesthetics, and they are not always necessarily measurable by simple empirical experimentations. Furthermore, these things tend to be personal and subjective and like any other behavioral research, very hard to quantify.

The other issue is of course dealing with the political aspect of any product development, as design strategies are often influenced by stakeholders, peers, and bosses who have their own agendas, priorities and biases. But I guess I very much agree that sometimes empirical or objective user research data is used as a sort of “bargaining tool”, in the sense that it helps explain and justify good design decisions to people without deep design skills or instincts — or to talk them out of bad design decisions. The designers need something to justify their creative design, while the ‘bosses’ so they called, often do not appreciate design opinions unless driven by research results, and I think this is an issue that can only be reconciled by a lot of compromise between the designers and stakeholders involved.

The article also stresses out the point that some less-rigorous methodologies and techniques are extremely helpful to the user experience designer; Card sorting, focus groups, guerilla usability testing, and user personas (even the ad hoc kind) can provide invaluable insights and useful tools for a design team, even as they are entirely subjective and even a little touchy-feely in nature. But sometimes they are the only valid ways of addressing the open-ended “wicked” problems such as "user Experience" design. As one comments in the article said, the designer’s art is to work with problems that cannot be tamed and come up with contingent solutions that work for one context at one time. User research for user experience should delve into the qualitative aspects of design to understand how and why people respond to what has been created, and, more importantly, how to apply that insight to future work.