Summary post: it's all about USERS. nothing else.

When I first bidded for this module, I knew I'm in for a totally different experience! Because it was a brand new module and it was about designing experiences! I was quite skeptical about experience design initially, as I always thought that it was very subjective, and pertains to individuals' perspective, cultural background, mood, character etc, and all sorts of other factors. Thus, to design an experience for users seem to an insurmountable task.. However as the course went by, I gradually understood the rationale behind the design process, and the different stages towards creating a product to fully test on users' experience on using it.

Bad design assignment
As a warm up assignment to find out what bad designs really were. To me, I always thought as long as the user be less picky, and try to be more tolerant of things, there would be no bad design at all. However, I was terribly wrong. There were designs that even the most forgiving person won't close one eye for them. Those designs were obviously done without any consideration or consultation from users (like the AS6 door handles), while some were designed more for functionality and others were simply to created to impress new users (Nokia's weird shape phones).

From this assignment, the importance of designing for users was being emphasized to us again, as it had before in NM3208. Now, apart from designing for users, we need to go an extra step to also invoke, not create, experiences of product users, so as to make the relationship" between the user and the product more than just plain ownership or interaction only.

Emotions and Design assignment
I had learnt the technical terms of humans' 3 levels of emotion processing (visceral, behavioral & reflective) and when linked to product design, they resulted in 3 dimensions (attractiveness, functional & prestige). As long as products were designed with those in mind, they could not go too far wrong from what their expected users would want, for those 3 dimensions form the basis of what users look out for when purchasing goods.

Human's emotions were so complex and broad, and to classify their processing into just 3 dimensions may seem a little restrictive to me. However, if we were not to do that, then there would be too many things that needed consideration, and hence making the design process even harder. Thus, it was often easier to set some constraints to a broad or limitless problem and try to perform analysis from there. The same flow of thought applies to designing things for a specific target group, rather than designing for a big and broad group. Gaining a small but substantial success from a small group is definitely better than getting mediocre response from a large group.

Reverse Marketing Analysis assignment
This was a new thing that I learnt, as I had no marketing experience beforehand. I think it was a useful analysis method as it helped to understand the users of existing products, and allowed designers to work their new product based on this knowledge of users. The four pleasures framework learnt in this course was also useful to give an insight as to why people experience pleasure. Pleasure was something that could be described in thousands of ways. With the four pleasure framework, I think designers could communicate more effectively on the same level, making design decisions more easily justified than without it.

User Persona was something completely new to me, and my first impression was "will this work"? By creating personas from imagination, is it really possible to find someone that fit our description? I was seriously not convinced by the use of persona at the start. Towards the end of the module, when we were again required to create personas for our final product, I realized its usefulness! Creating personas could let me as a designer know exactly whom am I designing the product for, and hence, make a more fitting product for that specific user. Even if there was no such user as described in my created persona, all of its charateristics should exist within actual users, thus there was no worry of designing something whereby no user would need it.

Nightmare Assignment
It was indeed a nightmare, for I thought the answer was already there to begin with, and what else could we do about it. However, through user probing techniques like cultural and technological probing, ethnographical studies and laddering, I realized that there were so much hidden aspects and concerns of users that were not known if no user research was carried out. I also realized that ethnography would not be much useful for me now, for most of the things noted during the process seemed normal to me, unless it was something that was particularly different from normal observation. On the other hand, cultural and technological probing through the use of questionaires was deemed more useful in this assignment. Even said so, I was still quite surprised by the findings which other groups presented during the lecture. Though I didn't quite agree with some of the findings from some of the groups, like feng shui, I accepted it that it was the voice of users, and every opinion of users matters in the design of a good product.

Final Project
The project began with confusion.
We sourced for a problem to be solved, we accompanied it with an intended solution right from the start of the project. BUT! finding the problem to be solved was actually the problem, and the solution of the problem actually lies in the problem itself! Sounds confusing wasn't it?

In simpler words, the whole process was as follows:
1. Discover: Find a possible spot in a market to enter, where a certain problem or deficiency lies
- perform user need analysis
- create user profiles and personas
2. Define: Based on the problem or deficiency, survey target users what improvements or needs they wanted for this problem to be solved or minimised
- obtain user and functional requirements
- devise experience strategy
3. Design: Based on the users' needs and wants, tailor a product to suit them
- coming out with the product's IA, interface design and prototyping
4. Evaluate: Test the product on users iteratively
- heuristic evaluation and user testing

Our initial idea was to create an aesthetically appealing game to capture the female gamers market. However, our approach was wrong to suggest a solution right from the start, and it was also not technically feasible to create the artist painting game. In the end, we chose to explore the market of casual learning of Japanese language. The process of gathering user needs and requirements was not that hard, for there were many people interested in it. Paper prototyping and initial user testing revealed some usability issues, which was initially not observed. Hence it was very useful in the early stages, so that changes could be altered easily.

The most problematic part of the project was actaully to make the whole layout look aesthetically pleasing to the users. As mentioned in lecture, that people indeed judged things by first impression and looks, our initial prototype failed terribly in that aspect. Thus we tried out best to ensure that the final product achieved a rather polished look.

While doing the project, the lecture also introduced branding and marketing topics to help us understand that experience was not only pertaining to product design and creation. Experience is a whole package which involves branding, looks, and everything that is linked to the product, even the staff of the organization. Although product makers could not control their own brand in the minds of the people, what they could do was to influence them heavily through marketing, appealing to users via the 3 emotions and 4 pleasure framework, and implanting trust into their products. Once a good or strong brand had been established, users would not need to think too much in future before purchasing another product from the organization again. $$!

Summary
Overall, this module really induced me to look deeply at product designs and why some failed terribly while a few of them achieved tremedous success. As there is a chinese saying that is goes like this: "knowing yourself and your target will allow you to gain success in every battle". It really fits well for this module. Once the target users have been known thoroughly, and knowing what we are capable of doing, we can deliver the most suitable product for them.

If there is only one thing to remember of this course, I would think it is:
"Experiences are unique to individuals, and experiences cannot be created. Successful designers are the ones who study them well, and invoke their positive experiences rather than the negative ones when using a product."

It had been a very fun, practical and applicational module. Glad that I had the chance to experience the experience of designing user experience before I graduate. It was definitely a pleasant experience.

After reading User Research Smoke & Mirrors..

This article describes the tough relation between designers and designer-hirers, and the hardships of designers trying to use scientific methods to prove their expert point of views.

Design is by default not science. By using scientific research methods to try to make sounds more convincing to people, I feel that it will only bring limitations and restrictions only. Design has their own rules and guidelines, but designers who are bold enough to break them and able to justify their actions will create breakthroughs. Science, on the other hand, adhere strictly to laws and results; hence by making scientific user research as the foundation of the design process, this is like asking designers live by numbers and results rather than experience and instinct.

Research as Design Tool
In this part, he mentioned about using eyetracking as a scientific research design tool. Seriously, does those few miliseconds that a user chose to place their focus on certain spot of the screen determines the usability of that page? The tool may tell where the user is looking at, but that does not mean the user is cognitively processing what he is seeing. ie: he may be just staring at that spot but thinking of something else. Personally, I feel that this eyetracking thing is something which people created to create a buzz only. It's usefullness is really debatable, and to zoom into where users may look at using technology may just seem like going a little too far. It should not be the case of technology driving design, but it should be technology facilitating design. Hence research should be at best to find out as much information required during the initial design stage, but those results should not be the determining steering factor for the later stages.

Research as Political Tool
I could definitely understand the usefulness of it being the only weapon for designers to retaliate against non-designer bosses. There are things which seem obvious to designers, but bosses usually find it hard to accept things without any support. Research helps to lend weight to the opinions of designers, but I also feel that it is something essential to CYA (cover your ass) when something goes wrong. At least the blame won't fall entirely on the designer when such things happen, and things do go wrong for most of the time.

Research as Bullshit
While I was reading up research papers for another module project, some of them really didn't seem impressive nor groundbreaking to me. In fact, I agree that some research are just bullshitting so as to make their results look outstanding, when there is actually not much practical usage for it. The article mentioned "Persona Rooms", which I feel, may be useful to a limited extend. When designers "walk into and live" in their users' space, the experience they are getting may not be the same as what the real users were experiencing, as experience is unique to individuals, and cultural / past experiences affects present experiences. It would actually be much better if the designer could arrange a homestay in potential users' houses. That may give a far more realistic experience than this mock up shell.

User Research isn't a Bad Thing
User research is never a bad thing, and the more user research being done, the deeper the understanding of users will be, and the better the product may possibly be too. It is just the extend to which it is being conducted, and knowing what knowledge or lessons that should extracted from the research that matters. Following results blindly will ruin an initial good design, but not following it may ruin the end product completely.

I believe that by utilizing moderate user research as a political tool and a design validator, designer will be able to work more effectively to create user-centric products while convincing their bosses of the design decisions. Over emphasis on the scientific research methods will only create more mess and trouble within the whole design process.

Assignment 4: Improving learning experience in LTs

In this "nightmare" assignment, we were asked to go and conduct an emotional probe on users, and seek to improve the learning experiences in lecture theatres (LTs). Why was it a "nightmare"? It was due to the fact that there could be no solution to this problem at all, or infinitely many different solutions, as we had to seek to fulfill improving the learning experiences for each user whom are uniquely different.

My other groupmate, Lim Zhen Qin, and I approached this problem with Technological probing, Laddering, and Ethnography. Our methodology was to find users of different LTs and ask them questions based on the first two approaches. We also conducted enthographical studies on the users, before we derive a conclusion for this assignment.

Our users / test participants were selected randomly from our circle of friends from various faculties within NUS. The LTs involved in this assignment are LT9, 27, 32, 33 and Engineering Auditorium.

Technological Probe
With reference to the Mac PowerBook experience illustrated in the lecture slides, we created a checklist and went through it with our participants just before and after visiting a LT. The purpose is to evaluate their visit of LTs as experience.

With reference to a specific LT of their choice, we asked the participants to describe their impressions and expectations of that LT, and to voice out their interactions with the objects found within the LT. We also asked them to relate it to similar experiences. This allowed us to know more about the participants' experience via the studied sense-making processes.

Laddering Approach
This approach was meant to dwell deep into a problem, so as to clearly identify the root of it, or at least find out a possible cause of the problem. However, it only looked into one of the branch of replies given by the participant, and hence, it may not address the problem fully.
Initially we were stuck at very short terminating answers, and the fault lies in the way we asked our participants. After several tries on different participants, we managed to obtain more relevant replies to the question: "What hampers your learning experience in LTs?"

Ethnographic Study
For this, we went to sit in for a lecture in LT33 and took notes on all that we could observe within the LT. Some of which includes the temperature, the number of students wearing jackets, using laptops, and even the amount of people going to the lecturer for consultation during the lecture break.

Overall findings on factors which affects learning experience
Physical aspects (LT accessibility, comfort, etc)
Human aspects (attitude of lecturers and/or students)
Cultural aspects (lecturers and students)

We felt that upgrading the physical aspects of the LT might not improve the learning experience on the whole, as this problem also deals with the cultural background and previous experiences of the users. Hence we suggest educating both lecturers and students to both take a step back so as to make learning a better experience, instead of blaming on the inadequacy of the LT, as humans will never get satisfied no matter how good a certain thing will be. If students are willing to learn, and lecturers are willing to spend time explaining, then no matter which kind of physical settings, the learning experience will be much better than having the best LT but the worst lecturers and students.

Other Presentations
The other presentations gave me more insights as to which areas were not looked into by our group. We did not consider about the timing of the lecture, the LTs that were not within NUS (some groups conducted a survey on LTs in SMU), and even the geographic location of which the LT was situated. I learnt that although physical and human factors were the most obvious and common ones that designers would look into, there exist other interesting factors like size of class, the shape and size of the LT, its external surroundings, feng shui etc. Those factors could provide a new perspective as to how learning experiences could be improved.