The X of UX

Mission Impossible IV: Talk about your experience with User Experience Design

As we learned from the start, Experience is something that is not definite enough to defined, to be created or to have a framework to base our judgments on. So, just as users, I'll base my experience with User experience based on my values, what I have experienced in my life and in NUS and my own intuitive judgments.

In the first few weeks we tried to understand experience. It's a complex combination of all socio, physio, psychological and ideological processes. These processes aim at DESCRIBE the experience more than DEFINE experiences. We found out something that we have been using casually and taken for granted is actually more complex and complete than that. All factors affect the experience a user has. Timing and location also contribute to the product (Hence, many isolated user testings failed). So given the class room time and location, my experience with UX in these aspects are:

On physio level: The room is kinda cold and it's like 2pm-5pm every Tuesday (nap time) hence it affected the feeling I have for the class

On socio level: A lot of classmates are there and they are all cool CNM students. Sharing the experience of users experiences with them is great. The process of the project was amazing. Although, there are a few debates where I felt they go more into personal level rather than being constructive and helping other groups out

On psychological level: This is the first time I have the look at different aspects of "Experience". It's interesting and attractive. The various method of user testings taught me to go beyond my own world, my own connections to connect with strangers and other targeted audience

On ideological level: I always believe Arts and Design is about making a statement, reflecting and changing lives in the perspective of the creators. I had a little discomfort at first about catering to users need and going opposite the directions of my designs ideas and ideology. However, I learned to look at different view and striking a balance between making my statement and getting this statement across to the users

Moving on to defining and understanding users. It is important to realize that we designers are restrictive by our own view and experience. Even our friends and acquaintance are from the same circle of thoughts and ideology. Hence, it was important for us to learn to reach out for people outside our circle to research about our products. It's hard to understand people because they might not always tell us exactly how they feel (Again, experience is a hard thing to define in the scope of words). Writing a persona as a reflect of what you know is so much easier than finding a new persona that you are not familiar with (while they are still maybe your target users)

Problem is another issue. The design aims to address a problem, preferably those that has a dominant impact (hence, large curstomer base) and have yet to be explored (so the market place is not saturated and we are not a me-too product). Ideas are many. Coming up with ideas is not the tough part. However, being able to identify one that satisfies the above is hard. Furthermore, novel ideas tend to get shoot down by others since they don't understand it that well. Also, user testing meets a lot of difficulties as it is unfamiliar and new to users. But these problem pays off as coming up with a new and novel innovation will guarantee us a place in the market rather than what has always been there.

The methods were taught and we tried different combinations of them. It was fun and although they all have their pros and cons, we found the ones that was the most suitable to us. Designing for experience sure takes our focus away from what we know to what the users want. And that is important since we are designing for them. We had a lot of difficulties with technical issues like Flash and programming. However, the knowledge we gathered from users and other similar functions from other website out there gave us a sort of guideline to move on. The low fidelity mock up was a great save of time for us in wasting our effort banging into walls of technical issues.

The most painful process, I must say, is the refining of the product. Every week one prototype after another we have to restart at least twice. Every small subtle details like color scheme, logo appearance, intro paragraph, etc. have been refined and argued within the group. And the more solid the prototype is, the more users we tested it out with. The more users are tested, the more mixed ideas, opinions, solutions were suggested. It was really hard to keep focus. And we had to restart once more even after the final prototype presentation, changing the entire layout, look and feel of the site.

The time limit put on the project didn't allow us to have more and further usability testing. We felt fortunate that we are doing this in a class of CNM major, who are all experts that helped us greatly with our evaluation. However, being in a university context, it was difficult for us to reach out for a sufficient mass to confirm the usability of our product. We tried to use all the method like thinking aloud, group discovery, etc. to the people that we can reach. If time allows, we would really hope to develop it further, functional wise and usability testing wise

So there it is, the experience I had with UX. It's kinda vague and many different trends of thought here and there. But as we said, experience are always like that, abstract and random, not necessarily definite and describable in words.

Of course this experience is just a starting for a career that we have chosen in CNM. And the class experience won't end until we receive a grade (preferably an A) in our transcript. Right? :)

User research: The science of subjectivity

So you are telling me all that we learned about user research and user testings in all our CNM courses are ultimately just common sense? It seems to be upsetting at first, but it made sense. We have all too much maths and science and precision and principles in University sometime we have NO common sense.

While formal testings like eye-tracking or isolated persona rooms may just be fancy ways to spend more research funding and prove certain political points to the less experienced or not very design-incline clients, they can be helpful in different ways. They can help confirm or prove a design concept is great or not to the mass.

However, it's a deceiving process trying to mask quantitative numbers and statistics to subjective comments and feelings or even experience. It's unethical to use this deception to gain reputation and credibility in design. However, as most of the world don't have deep design understanding and they tend to look for logical explanations (esp engineers), they tend to fall for this deception

That doesn't mean user research is bullshit. It's not. But the fact remains it's subjective. Casual methods like card sorting, or random interviews, etc. can be extremely insightful and helpful to designers. It's feeling and touching and other subjective perspective of human.

So in order to have a good design, it is important to admit that all users are subjective and they judge base on their own life experience. User centric design will go around searching for the right representative users, asking the right questions, accessing how they feel and design around the most important aspects and through their insights.

But then again all this is subjective. The writer himself said he might be wrong. So I could as well might be wrong. We could all might be wrong. Science might have exceptions. And trying to have all deception and special rules to mask those errors to make them explanable and quantizable is just plain wrong