This week, we looked into Human-Centred/UX Design. User Experience Design consists of designing to meet the needs of the user, or whatever target audience that the product is being made for, such as children, teenagers, young adults or older generations. It is important, in UX Design, to approach a design with these key elements in mind: typography, colour and image. If a website or app is not able to be easily used or navigated by the user, then it does not meet the user requirements. If someone were to come across something they could not easily navigate or use, they may grow frustrated, bored or hopeless and give up on the service right away, which is not what companies want their customers to be doing.
“All design should be human-centred, it’s as simple as that. And I mean human-centred, not ‘user-centred’ or ‘user-friendly’, because users are human beings after all.” – David Townson
IDEO
We took a look at IDEO, which are a renowned company known for their creative approaches to complex global issues and crisis. For example, they organised a research project to motivate the youth to stay at home during the pandemic, and to encourage social distance practicing. In their research, it became clear that confusing terminology, monotone or long commercials, dull posters, and shame tactics didn’t sit will or resonate well with the youth that they studied. It was obvious to the designers that they needed a specific set of rules and principles in order to communicate with the youth:
- Brevity and simplicity – Young people want the information given to them as fast and straight-forward as possible, and often stop listening to an advert after 60 seconds.
- Co-creation and collaboration – Young people want to help in their own, so encouraging them to do things themselves, and contribute as a unique individual to the cause, gives them a collective effort.
- Collectivity – They gravitate towards unity and connectivity: the sum of us, not just some of us.
- Entertainment and playfulness – This helps messages stick to the mind of youths. Keeping them entertained is key, as their main sources of entertainment are closed at the moment (schools, parks, movie theatres, restaurants).
They also found that the target audience tended to lean more towards edgy and bold fonts, as well as vibrant colours and gradients. With all these elements in mind, the team at IDEO designed a series of marketing campaigns, such as social media posts, t-shirts and radio DJ scripts.
GitHub
We were also introduced to GitHub, and Git, a piece of software that manages changes to projects without overwriting any part of the project. GitHub is a Git repository hosting service, where you can share your work, and contribute and collaborate with others on projects. All work is safely stored on the cloud. There are several benefits to using this in our work, such as:
- Makes it easy to roll back to the previous version (undo errors)
- Makes it easy to share code with other people without creating conflicts
- Makes it easy to deploy changes from multiple sources
- Backs up your work to the cloud
Markdown Exercise
We were then asked to complete our first task on GitHub. I have created a separate post for this exercise.