Four pleasure Analysis - User Profile

Imaginary Subject: Rachael, 27 years old real estate agent, living in Singapore.

Currently working as an assistant director at a real estate company specializing in private luxury house. This is her second job since graduation, where she obtained a second upper honor degree.

She wants to be in control and to have the best thing possible. She wants to attract attention and be the center of every occasion. Rachael loves to shop. Shopping gives her the control she wants over things that she buys and also the empowerment of beng the one: incharge. She likes to express herself and want the world to see her as a smart and pretty woman. For her public appearance and people's favorable look toward her are extremely important.

Rachael is dating James, her 5th boyfriend in the last 3 years. She changes boyfriend often, no matter how long they have been together. As a smart woman, she wants to consider her "options" before making a commitment. She wants to see who can provide her the best and can be the most "fun". She wants to be in control of her boyfriends, too. The guys normally follow her to shop and pay for her meals and expenses. And she is always the one to break up with them as a new one comes along.

Rachael's parents are divorced, each is successful with their carreer. She stays with her Mom. She has a lot of friends, mostly shopping buddies and male follower.

Rachael loves to club. She went clubbing twice a week. She enjoys being the center of the party and having fun, hanging around with good looking guys on the dance floor. It makes her feel pretty, powerful and young.

Four pleasure analysis of Rachael:

Physio Pleasure:
- Rachael wants to be in shape and appearance possible. She watches her diet closely and carefully - Need pleasure
- She sometimes like to spend the days at luxury relaxations, probably paid for by her boyfriends - Appreciation pleasure

Socio pleasure
- Rachael has a strong need to be liked and admired by others. She loves to attract attention and be the center of attention - Need pleasure
- Rachal also wants to be an appealing and powerful woman. The fail relationship between her parents made her think very carefully about commitment in relationship and changes boyfriend easily as she wants to be with the best. She doesn't want to get hurt, so she chooses to hurt others if neccessary. Self-centered with a strong need of social interaction
- She wants to be around people and admired by them. That's the reason she clubs a lot and likes to hang out with a lot of friends, even when none of them matters

Psycho pleasure
- Rachael's job needs a lot of going out and meeting client. Hence she always need to be pretty whenever she's out and about. She finds pleasure in shopping and hanging around with guys, preferably those that have crush for her. Having guys indulge her and care for her and spend on her give her a sense of empowerment. She's independent and can buy things on her own, but she still prefer to have the guys spend, as a way of proving her worth of beauty and social standard
- She considers herself to have good taste in things, especially guys.
- She's very strict with her self in term of achievement and satisfaction. She's hardly satisfied with things that she is having, always keep looking for better things.

Ideo pleasure:
- From her parents' unhappy marriage, Rachael's idology is to make the best of life. She wants to have options and being able to choose from them. She wants to live life without regrets. She wants herself to be happy, no matter how many others get hurt. Self centered and powerful are important to her.
- In term of moral values, she's extremely liberal. She doesn't want to be bounded by society and their notions of what is right. Changing boyfriend quickly, sometimes having many at the same time give her this sort of fun, empowerment and in control she always wanted. She's a Christian. However, she doesn't want to come to church or hang around with her religious cohort. She has strong admiration for young, pretty and powerful women such as Paris Hilton.

The phone for Rachael:



- Physio pleasure
+ Small and lightweight: Need
+ Sensitive keyboard with good predictive text - Need
+ Pleasing texture and open easily - Appreaciated

- Socio Pleasure
+ Unique/customized design - Appreciation
+ Large phone books to store contacts - Need
+ Using the most famous brandname

- Psycho pleasure
+ Camera and good playback of music/video - Need
+ Good design, must be really eye catching but not overly flashy-Need
+ Personalized and unique - Need

- Ideo
+ The phone that is perceived as expensive, classy, trendy and bold

Products experience in Behavioral, Reflective and Visceral

User experience with product: Digicam

1. Olympus Evolt-500 Digital SLR camera:

• Behavioral: great performer, bulky and not easy to handle
• Reflective: cool, show-off
• Visceral: very exciting with every shuttle sound, very thrilling with quality of pictures taken
  

2. Canon IXUS 750

• Behavioral: good performer, very portable, very convenient
• Reflective: not much show off value in term of gadget
  
• Visceral: not very thrilling when used
  

3. Nikon Coolpix

• Behavioral: good perfromer, not very portable
• Reflective: Not a show off camera
• Visceral: Not very thrilling or exciting to use
  

Assignment 1: Bad user experience

In this assignment we will analyse a bad user experience and what made it so bad. Below is a screencap of my example


-User Experience: Let us hear a day of Fushan, a year 3 student in Computational Science
+ He woke up at 8:00am and was excitedly waiting for the clock to strike 9:00am. He then could start the bidding process, which is a process to register for his courses in Nationaly University of Singapore through a computerize bidding system (Think ebaying for courses)
+ 9:00am He logged on, key in his User name, Password. It should be "smooth and straight forward", he thought
+ The server returned error
+ He tried 10 minutes later. He tried again 30 minutes later. And one hour later. He was getting frustrated. He had another class, but he decided to skip so that he could bid for his very important course that he didn't get earlier on.
+ 2 hours later, the site admin relreased a statement that the server had some error. "Please check again for further notice".
+ So he checked every hour, only get more and more frustrated.
+ 11:00pm, they finally announced they fixed it. However, Fushan couldn't log in until next morning 9:00am. That night he went to sleep with the same anxiety of whether he could get his module. He prayed to God "Please let me log in to CORS tomorrow"
+ This experience already happened to Fushan for at least 3 semesters in his University life.

- Lessons learned:
+ Servers do have problem once in a while. But we don't see sites that support thousands or millions of access worldwide like Google or Yahoo screw up that often.
+ However, this problem has occured almost every semester. In Fushan's year 1 he had know that the problem was caused by "All Freshmen are not sure of the system's rule and thought it was first come first serve. Hence they jammed the system". Any system like this must be able to support multi thousand concurrent accesses. Blaming the freshmen just won't do it.
+ There are peak hours of accessing because, as students, we tend to be really nervous about courses and sometimes some students just log in to see their bidding and make sure things are going right.
+ Anxiety and annoyance when you cant get your courses in a University and you are graduating soon is really unbearable.

- Suggestions (This is just blind shooting, some may have been done by the system administrators):
+ Have alternative servers and be able to switch if one jams. Maybe dedicate one server to a few Facs and another for the others.
+ Be prepared every semester, at every round
+ Have longer period and duration for each bidding round, to reduce the anxiety in students and thinning out the peak hours.
+ When problem occurs, don't blame the freshmen or student because they all logged in at the same time. As users they are supposed to have the priviledge to log on when they want.

First post

This blog is to track my progress of a new design course in NUS
A pathway = the pathway to an A (I know it's kinda lame but cant help it. Lame is the word that best describe me).
OK, just testing and talking kok with this post so the "real stuffs" will come next week.