I would rather consider designing as cooking. When I try to cook, there must be a recipe for me to follow the guidelines. The quantity of the ingredients must be exactly the same as from the recipe. As time goes by, you probably have a sense of switching out some ingredients or stop measuring the quantity of some ingradients; you don’t need a timer to see when the cooks are fully cooked. Once I am an expert of certain dishes, I might even start improvising to create my own recipe. The recipe might be a good start for beginners. However, to become a chief at a restaurant, it requires experimentation, practice, evaluations, and creativity.
I started my design process with the five phases of the Design thinking Process, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Nevertheless, this is only the recipe for beginners. Throughout the semester, I started to create tools and experience arcs for the projects and materials that I need.
Emphasizing what the user needs is vital since that is the first step of the design process.Before I even start my design process, I need to know what the need-findings are for our users, such as what they need. Interacted with my classmates to build a unique design and user experience that will accomplish required goals in efficient ways. The reason we choose “cities for
college students to choose after they graduate” as our conversational interface is that we actually gain real insight into users and their needs. I created some personas before we actually got to implement questions. This is how emphasizing impacts my design process. With a great emphasizing stage, I will be able to have a general idea for design.
Collaboration is one consideration for my design process. Collaboration allows me to listen to a diversity of ideas. Therefore, I could approach my goal, which is usability, from a different angle. For our paper prototype, we incorporate every team member’s design into one. This is where mixed-initiative UI comes to the stage. Our decision moves from having the menu bar at the bottom to having the bar at the top of the mobile website, and we decided to have the menu bar fixed while scrolling. The users will know which page they are on by the lighter color of the feature page they are on. Therefore, at that point, my focus is on the user experience through useful design. I want to make sure that users gain some advantage from our website. “Design is just not how it looks and feels like. Design is how it works” by Steven Jobs. Having a fantastic user experience design not only highlights and promotes our product, it has become the takeaway of building and growing customer confidence.
My next design process is to think outside of the box to look for alternative ways to view the problem. Here is where I would choose to brainstorm. The brainstorming part is particularly useful for my data visualization project. My group members and I were stuck on how to start “clear communication and reasoning”. We brainstormed many ideas, such as states v.s covid patients, gender v.s. Infection rate, etc. This would be useful to users of our data visualizations. They would be interested in seeing data that is not being popular displayed. Sometimes the expectation did not come to reality, it is hard to make everyone happy. Although these
graph might not making sure everyone’s concerns are addressed, it is more about recognizing that the set of choice in any design problem in enormous, and the more that all of us can help each other anticipate the advantage and disadvantage of these choice, the more considered the decision I will make, and therefore the better the decision I will make.
Prototyping is probably the most important part in my design process, it is the part that has the highest likelihood of affecting the decision I made. Testing my prototype with users will save my time on experiments that won’t work out. For our fox theater mobile website, we conducted user research which is observing the existing processes that users use to complete their task, identifying the pain points and hypothesizing on how to make the tool better.We changed the menu bar into hamburger menu bar due to some users need to click on the
buttons multiple times to activate the buttoms. For our physical prototype, we started our idea from a sketch which is using Play Dough to test whether attaching the NFC chips would work and create interaction with our classmates. He knew what to do once he saw the QR code,
but our users did not know the NFC chips. Nevertheless, once we told them about the NFC chips, they were surprised by the functionality of our design. This is definitely a positive response that I receive, so I know that design’s usability is on its way.
Last of my design process would be the preliminary evaluation, testing our solution out. Fortunately, my team and I were able to run our test before the deadline. We ran our preliminary design with the TAs and Professor.Wall. We would like to see whether the design is
useful. Our physical figurine will help users to find more details of the fox theater without typing any URLs. The users are also able to find what they need. By running the preliminary evaluation, I was also able to gather suggestions from users that I can incorporate
into my next design. It is not about how I think whether or not my design works, but it should be the users saying the usefulness of our design. This will impact my result. For the case of the NFC chips, the preliminary evaluation reminded me that adding a QR code
would be more straightforward.