First things first, here are the notes I wrote out on what was covered in this weeks lecture…
A lot of things were covered in this weeks lecture, from the probability of an AI design take over, to onboarding, to user personas and more. Same as last week I’m just going to reflect on s couple of things that stuck out to me from this lecture.
The first thing we looked at was AI being used in design industry like how Airbnb built one that turns sketches into product source code, and AI that create custom logos, banners etc. The general gist I got from this part was that AI could be great for outsourcing, like when you need a code monkey, but they’re just incapable of even remotely matching human levels of creativity. It’s nice to know I probably won’t be out of a job when the AI uprising comes about. 😅
We looked at the concept of having “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”, that long term goal that everyone in a company understands and gets behind. An example mentioned was JFK encouraging the race to the moon which is quite pertinent to us now considering the project we’re doing for 304. I suppose if I go with the Healthcare product idea I’ve got in my head, my BHAG would be to reimagine the college student experience, putting health and wellbeing at the top of a students priorities so that they are better able to take on all the other aspects of the student experience. I don’t know really, I’m gonna have to think on that a bit more.
As a task, we did the IDEO’S Frame Your Design Challenge where we took the product ideas we had come up with and answered the 5 or 6 questions I have listed somewhere in my notes above in like the 5th image I think. Here is what I did for that…
I think this was a good way of both further validating my idea and figuring out what I’m really trying to do and who I’m trying to help here with this idea by framing it as a design question.
We looked at another Law of UX : Hick’s Law. As I understand it, Hick’s Law is not to give users too many options and decisions to make. Basically you wanna avoid users having the same type of experience we’ve all had using streaming services like Netflix, Prime, Disney plus etc. that offer us so much choice that we end up spending ages trying to pick something to watch from the sea of crap that eventually we give up because you can’t find anything exactly like the great show you just watched but different, so we go to the likes of tiktok and youtube with better personal curation or even plain old live television where the decision of what to watch is basically made for us with the only options being between like 12 channels instead of thousands of movies and tv shows unless of course you have sky or something but who would in the age of streaming services. This analogy probably isn’t the most accurate to explain hick’s law but it’s what I thought of and this is my personal reflection so it’s how I’m explaining it.
This brought us into considering the onboarding process which now I know to make as quick low effort for the user as possible. I think I would do this by chunking customisation options to when new users go to sections where those options are relevant. If most users are like me and just wanna get in and start exploring, not have to read a bunch of instructions and answer a load of questions first, then I can imagine this idea working out pretty well.
We looked at user personas which is a research method I first attempted last semester. I think I might try using ai people this time for them. I learned that person people aren’t simply fake people, they are more so detailed expressions of the type of person who would want to use your product and why they’d have reason to depending on different contexts. We watched a video about figuring out the human motivation for buying McDonalds milkshakes which was very interest and informative.
Yeah so that all the things that stuck out to me, overall, this was a pretty good lecture and we looked at a lot of interesting stuff.