I first started my journey with designing for user experience in the first lecture of the module. Though it was a short introductory lesson, I was exposed to the concept of user experience. It is about the overall quality of experience one has when interacting with the product or system. This is different from the usual fuctionality, usabillity or asthetic view that one perceives when interacting with the product or system. I learnt that this whole idea of user experience is an emerging discipline and it is indeed of a higher level than functionality or usability.
For the warm up assignment, we had to find a bad design. This got me started to be on the look out for products and designs that are bad. I learnt to observe the designs of products around me and found some products are indeed badly designed. Also, from hearing the presentations done by my classmates, I felt that some designs are not considerate enough as they do not take into account the usability of the product in the actual environment.
Assignment 1 definitely made me learnt about the definitions of visceral, behavioural, and reflective designs and how to apply these concepts to the product. “It is not possible to design for experience” but how the product is designed can evoke emotions and create personal experiences for individual users. Patrick Jordan’s 4 pleasures (physio, socio, psycho, ideo) gave me further insight to categorise the different types of pleasure. Of course, it is only a framework to organise thought and emotions better and serves as a guideline to how the product may be pleasurable.
I find that the laddering approach is an interesting and useful approach because the final result obtained is usually very different from the start. It enables designers to have a deeper understand of the needs and concerns for the users that they are designing the product for. It is important to understand the users and design something that caters to people in that category.
The nightmare “improving learning experience for lecture theatres” assignment led me to observe the behaviour and comments by students in the LT environment, when conducting enthnographic research. As a result of the observation, Joel and me compiled a list of problems and solutions revolving the learning experience in lecture theatres. Often, observation can reveal personal perceptions by the anonymous.
The final project, which is the ePan entertainment system for Fish & Co., lasted 8 weeks and my group went through an in-depth analysis for the system. It started from idea generalising, to knowing the objectives and goals of Fish & Co., to doing a needs analysis, to creating scenarios and information structure, to producing prototypes. This process made me learnt a lot as I was able to apply the concepts taught throughout the course to the ePan entertainnment system. We need to consider many factors and think of our target users and what they really want, in order to create a product that is functional, asthetically-pleasing and also having a positive user experience.
All in all, it has been a pleasant experience taking the module of user experience design! Now, I have a better understanding of the whole upcoming concept of UX and the concept will help me in designing or evaluating any design next time. I would like to thank Reddy for teaching this interesting course and also my classmates for listening to my/my group’s presentations and giving feedback and for sharing what they have done during their presentations! (:
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