Week 1: Introduction to UX Design

UXD720

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Don Norman's definition of design is:

“Design is concerned with how things work, how they are controlled, and the nature of interaction between people and technology” (Norman 2013). He expresses in his book that when the product or service is designed well, it creates a pleasant product that users continue to use. However, if it is not designed well, it causes frustration, and the product is unusable.

UX design creates products and services that are “desirable, usable and useful” (Patrick-Brown 2021). The UX process involves implementing methods and techniques to understand and interpret the users' needs and goals to create a product for them (Buley 2013: 4).

This week's course content touches upon the different areas of user experience (UX), such as research, architecture, interaction, usability, visual design, and content.

At the start of the Masters, I originally wanted to focus on the visual design of UX. However, as I have been progressing onto the course and learning about user research and other areas, I don’t want to limit my learning and options, so I am intrigued to learn more.

Challenge activity

We were given the task of interviewing one of our peers about how they use their desk space. The task involves evaluating the current design and defining a set of problems. Then redesign the space based on the interview and share the solution with them to gather feedback.

I reached out to Carmen and asked her a set of questions which are designed to be open-ended. It was essential to listen and let her talk as this may reveal crucial elements to the design space.

Based on the interview, I have extracted and gathered the issues of the desk space and generated a problem statement.

Problem statement

Carmen uses her desk frequently for many purposes such as work, playing video games, doing art projects, eating and watching tv. She has many tangled wires on her desk area and has to keep switching devices in the USB ports.

• The main issues she faces are the tangled wires of her laptop, monitor, printer, router and mouse. It gets in the way of things, and she cannot move her laptop as the wires restrict her.

• She has to switch the wires around because she does not have many USB ports.

• Her desk may have been incorrectly assembled because squeaking and shaking occur when working at her desk.

• Another issue is that her desk is white; she prefers something that requires less cleaning up when she's doing art projects.

• She would like to have wet wipes on her desk to access them when she is working. Her concern is that there is no space for it, and it may fall out of the basket.

Figure 1: Current desk space

Figure 2: New designed desk space

Figure 2 shows my proposed solution to Carmen's desk space concerns.

When I submitted my design in the student forum, I received positive feedback from Carmen. She was happily surprised at some of the suggestions in the design and that I have addressed and solved every pain point she communicated.

Reflection

When reflecting on this activity, it was nice to work with another student on the course. I enjoyed the interviewing process and experimenting with Adobe tools to practice designing graphics. Graphic design is not my strongest skill; however, I would like to develop my creativity to enhance my practice in this course.

My key takeaway for this week is to ask the right open-ended questions, which encourages the user to elaborate. I wanted to make sure I solved all of Carmen’s issues, and I am happy that I completed the challenge very well. To improve the process, I could further discuss some of the themes she brings up and try not to rely heavily on a structured interview. This would reveal more profound findings and insights.

References

BULEY, Leah. 2013. The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. Rosenfeld Media.

NORMAN, Donald A. 2013. ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. In Published in 2013 in New York NY) by Basic Books. New York (N.Y.) : Basic books, 2013.

PATRICK-BROWN, Clementine. 2021. ‘Week 1: The Design Process’. Learn Falmouth [online]. Available at: https://learn.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/282/pages/week-1-the-design-process?module_item_id=12739 [accessed 26 Jan 2022].