First things first, here are the notes I wrote out on what was covered in this weeks lecture…
This week’s lecture was essentially a pretty comprehensive introduction to the module IXD303: Designing User Experiences. To my understanding, in this module we’re going to dive deeper into the world of user experience design than we have in any other module so far and I’m looking forward to getting better acquainted with the different ux techniques commonly used in the industry so that I’m better prepared for placement.
We got an overview of what we’ll be looking at in the months ahead and what we’re expected to accomplish by the end of the module. We’ve only got one core project to work on this semester which is ton design a digital product for the healthcare sector. We looked at what type of users we could design which was great as I tend to go straight to straight to thinking up ideas for a product, this helped me refocus and realise that I need find the need for a product first, before designing it.
One of the things we looked at was the design council’s ‘Double Diamond’, which acts as a clear, comprehensive and visual description of the design process. We are at the diverging stage of the first pyramid where you’re meant to really dissect the brief and do the research. For this diverging stage, we’ve been put in groups of five to do collective research on healthcare as broadly as we can until we get to the converging stage later on where we zone in on particular areas. I think this is going to be an interesting experience which will no doubt prepare me a bit more for working as a part of a ux team in the future which is great, I just have to make sure I do my bit as best I can.
We also started looking at the laws of ux, something we looked at a bit in 1st year but now I think we’re looking at them in a bit more detail individually week by week. This week we looked at Jakob’s Law. To my understanding, Jakob’s Law in layman’s terms, is that people prefer things to be familiar to the things they’ve already been accustomed to. Users will build expectations as they use digital products like mobile apps and website, and expect future products they use to adhere a reasonable amount to those expectations. Basically, be in keeping with what user understand and are used to, they are better able to get what they need done rather than spending time learning how to go about it. This is why it’s really important not to make a bunch of new changes to a product all at once, rather than making necessary changes at a gradual rate, because you would only end up overwhelming, confusing and frustrating the people using it.
Overall I’m looking forward to making my way through this module as I think it’s really going to help me prepare for placement next.