Reflections on NM4210

In defining the term User Experience Design, you get designing for user's experience. When I first came across this module, I had the presumption that user experience was confined mostly to online experiences i.e. designing a website that facilities good user feedback. However, the 3 months run proved otherwise.

As I joined this module only in the 4th week of school, much of what was covered before began as a blur to me. It was till reading up on slides did I understand that designing for user experience was not so much based on the physical, functional, and aesthetic capabilities of the product but even much more on the emotional aspects of the product. The essence of this appeals to me to quite a great extent. Understanding this, I reflected on my choice of products as a consumer and realized that, indeed, a product has to entice me emotionally for me to actual rate it an excellent purchase.

This module educated me from the designer's point of view and coupled with my personal consumer point of view, I achieved a better understanding in designing for user experience. This module left me with very practical skills that I believe would prove useful in my future endeavors.

Reflections on Final Project

The final project experience was an integration of all the materials learned in the semester. It began with developing a Needs Analysis Report, determining your product, determining user ideals including wants, needs and expectations, coming up with focal personas, developing low and high fidelity products and finally evaluating the practicalities of the product through surveys and questionaires. Four stages in total, but there was quite a bit of work to be done next to working on presentations and writing the report.

There was quite an amount of time and effort contributed to conducting laddering interviews. Laddering interviews were conducted to determine user ideals. We started from a broad and basic question and slowly narrowed them down to specific needs, wants and expectations. The idea generation part was exceptionally tedious. Our initial idea was something resembling a carrier. The main function was to lighten the load of heavy bag carriers. The idea was not feasible as it was not a practical concept. Much more time had to be spent brainstorming and reconceptualizing. Fortunately, one of the team members mentioned napping in school and we thought, why not?

The method used to determine if this was a viable concept was, again, through conducting laddering interviews. Through these interviews (use NUS students as our focus audience), this is the information that we have gathered:

• There are 3 aspects that determine napping in public: (1) the environment (2) the material of the surface you're napping on (3) your state of mind
• Most of our interviewees want to nap in public, especially in between lessons or during study breaks. However, the problem is always finding a place to nap.
• In addition to that, most people who nap on tables wake up to find fingerprints on their forehead

In presenting our interviewees with our idea, these are their responses:

• The interviewees liked the idea of a comfortable surface to nap on
• However, the common concern was the portability of the product

With these informations, we generated a design for our product. The idea was to integrate a laptop carrier with a napping function, after all, most NUS students carry their laptops around and we believe that this would apply to students of other institutions as well. The predominant problem faced in design generation was to consciously try to reduce the bulk of the product. A laptop case itself was bulky enough. Our idea was to integrate an inflatable pillow as part of the laptop case. This was also one of the main concerns of our interviewees.

Our end product was a physical product which we have branded, Naptop. Below are some pictures of our high-fidelity prototype:

An inflated Naptop. The top part is the pillow.

The clean of underside of the pillow where our heads rest on.
Where we can put our laptops in

After we have made the prototype, there were more considerations in deciding the material to use for the pillow. The inflatable/deflatable function was the most attractive as it encompasses the technology of a life jacket and is less bulky and does not add as much weight. The rest of the ideas were a gel-layered or Styrofoam-layered glue that pieces the pillow and the laptop case together. These ideas were not aesthetically feasible.

We are pleased with our final project and comments given were mostly positive.

Article review - User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 5: Non-Scientific User Research isn’t a Bad Thing

As Christopher Fahey relates in his article, scientific quantitative analysis may be the only measure that gives an extensive and detailed analysis but less rigorous methodologies like card sorting and focus groups may be more useful to a user experience designer. Usability testing and user personas, for example, provide more insightful measures as compared to traditional analytical measures. Due to its qualitative nature, these measures are entirely subjective, enabling user experience designers to design products specific to user ideals.