Hmm… The process matters. Well, I guess that’s because in User Experience Design, where our designs are user-centric and the process revolves around what the user wants, a good process will have to lead to a great product. Well, I guess…
After learning about all the design theories in NM2208 what with Gestalt and the Colour Wheel, we have moved on to focusing on what the users really expect and how to empower them. So this post is supposed to be about my experience with Designing for UX. Ambivalent, I say. Ambivalent because I found the module wonderfully refreshing and confusing at the same time.
So my group (Si Wei, Jeremy, Zhenfeng and myself) initially wanted to do a game as our final project, promoting love for the arts. Well, we got the approach wrong at the start. One of the things that I learnt from Mr. Reddy is that UX Design is NOT about trying to hard-sell to the market a well-designed package of what you think they want. It’s about giving them what they really want, with added value and bells-and-whistles. I remember our group consulted him for a long period of time as to how we should go about approaching the project. One of the e-mails which he replied provided a very refreshing insight to creating user experience…
“Difference between functional service vs a service which has potential in creating positive experience. i’ll give an example – flying by singapore airlines vs Air India. Cost of ticket is same, aircraft is same, but experience is very different.
One airline understands what their customers need and value. Other one does not.”
I’ll remember this.
I learnt the various ways to go about doing research and analysis to better our designs to invoke that user experience. Apart from card-sorting which we picked up in NM3208, we also dealt with laddering, pleasure analysis and various forms of probing (Okay only 2, Cultural and Technological). Concepts are boring by themselves and for me, it was a chore to have to learn about them. But I realise that only through applying them then do I see their usefulness and how helpful they can be. Laddering sounds like one of those irritating pranks which we play on our friends, probing them with tonnes of unreasonable “Why?”. But if we know how to wield it correctly with appropriate questioning skills, we can truly gain insights to the roots and fundamental of problems that will aid us in user experience design. Research matters and they are all not just smoke and mirrors. One just has to know its limitiations and how to go about conducting them fairly. That’s tough and that comes with great experience.
User experience cannot be created. Though I was confused a bit here and there between creating and invoking user experience, I think I got it. Here’s an analogy: It was a great experience taking NM4210 because the students’ were given the appropriate amount of freedom, with guidance to approach their projects and assignments whereas some other NM module which I took was bad because even though we got to produce some amazing products via our projects, the lecturers, criteria, guidelines were strict and suffocating and had no idea how and what the students desired to learn from their module and the entire process and experience was, the least to say, excruciating.
That said, I think some other lecturers in NUS should learn to take a page from Mr Reddy’s teaching style =)
