IXD303 : Week 2 Lecture Reflection

First things first, here are the notes I wrote out on what was covered in this weeks lecture…

 

This weeks lecture was all about Research techniques. We covered a lot in this lecture so I’m just going to reflect on the parts that really stick out in my memory.

We started by looking at the importance of staying open minded, to being open to new idea and be able to easily get interested in something, especially when you become an expert where ones mind tends to get bogged down with preconceptions and close up. I consider myself generally to be quite an open minded person, and particularly when it comes to creative pursuits and design. I’m always open to exploring new ideas, styles and trends and I like to hope that it shows in the work I do. I can’t imagine myself losing that aspect of myself but I’ll have to be mindful when I become more experienced so that I don’t close up my mind to newness.

We looked at Needs Driven Design, asking the question “Does this need to exist?”, validating your ideas essentially.  What’s the problem I’m trying to solve here? What user goals am I helping to satisfy? These questions I can ask myself as I’m validating my pending healthcare product ideas and it’s not too early to start involving users. So, if I end up going the route of an app for college students or 18-15 year olds, I can start asking the ones besides myself that I have quick access to, what they think of my idea and if it would be something that they could seem themselves or people they know finding helpful in their day to day lives.

During the lecture we were given the task of checking our local health centre’s website and seeing if we could find certain things I have listed somewhere in my notes above…like the third image maybe? Anyway, as I hail from Letterkenny I went ahead and looked up the Letterkenny Doctors website which you can find here if you’re at all curious. 🧐

 

I had never seen the site before so I was quite pleasantly surprised by how decently designed it was. Especially considering some of the absolute ui train wrecks some of my classmates have to put up with from their GPs. I like that there is a nice coherent colour palette and I especially love the use of iconography about the place. I love icons, they’re a valuable feature from an accessibility stand point but also I find that their a way to really bring a real sense of style to the overall design of a product.

We looked at Postel’s Law as this week’s law of ux. As I understand it, in essence the law is that the more research you do and open to input you are, the better your design  outcomes will be. Basically good input = good output.

We looked at the research landscape, what kind of research is qualitative and what’s quantitative. I think I’d be more partial towards qualitative research methods like 1 to 1 interviews and observing users. Not that there isn’t merit in quantitative, because there certainly is, but I feel like with qualitative you’re able to humanise users a lot more than by just analytics and survey responses and so I find its easier to build empathy with the users you’re designing for which is very important I think. Although this is really just a theory of mine. I don’t think I’ve done enough of either to determine which type of research I like better.

 

Well, I think those were all the things that stuck out to me so I’ll just end by saying, overall, this was a very informative lecture and I learned a ton from it.

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