UXD Principles and Concepts - Week 7 - Reflective Journaling

I guess the thing that stuck with me the most from this class this week is how much so many of the things we touched on and studied in the previous six weeks in the course seemed to come to a head in working on the User Persona design assignment that we were given. Right away I started mentally putting together a Type System for this design. I also found myself remembering concepts and principles about using color, balance, grouping, framing, and, of course, grids (as required!) while doing the work. 

I also found that, even though I put a great amount of thought into my initial design, and originally felt fairly satisfied with it, the more I looked at it, the more I felt like it could still be better. Ultimately, I worked up 3 different designs for the assignment, and, while I sort of felt like the third design was probably the best, I still felt drawn toward my first design -- maybe because it was my first design, I may have felt somewhat attached to it. But I still wasn't sure which one was really the best, so I decided to engage in some original User Experience research and sent all 3 designs to a friend who I've done some design work for, and asked for their opinion on the designs. As it turned out, my friend much preferred the last iteration of my design the most. What surprised me, however, was that they said they liked my initial design second best, while finding my second design, which I really did feel was an improvement over the first, by far the worst. Thinking again about this opinion, though, the second design really was kind of a transitional version of my first design; my third design contained elements of both the first and second one. So, even though I didn't tell them which was first, second, and third, I suppose it's possible that the second, transitional, design may have communicated its awkward, "adolescent" stage of design in a way that I was too close to it to perceive. I still feel like it had improvements over the first design, but I think now that those improvements were more at home, more fully fleshed-out, in the final design, and may have just seemed like bad choices acting upon the first, more intuitive design. As always, it helps to revise, revise, revise, and also to seek a second opinion from a disinterested party/potential user.

UXD Principles and Concepts - Week 6 - Reflective Journaling

It hadn't really occurred to me when I decided to go into the UXD field and undertake a master's degree in it that part of the course of study would include a study of typography, but I was more than delighted to find that out. I have been fascinated with typography, hand-lettering (calligraphy/sign-painting, etc.), the histories of letterforms, and the use of type/lettering in art and design for as long as I can remember. In gradeschool, I would regularly take out big books of lettering styles from the library, and spend hours at home trying to learn to use Speedball calligraphy and lettering pens to try to reproduce the various kinds of lettering styles in them. I have always appreciated the use of words and letterforms in fine art as well as in the commercial graphic arts, and in my own personal artwork have long incorporated hand-lettering of all kinds. So it's been great fun this week to get some quick exposure to the ways in which type is utilized in the field of User Experience Design, and learning some of the more technical aspects of how typography is formally used in a UXD project. 

As much as I feel like I already knew quite a bit about typography just from my own personal research and interest in it over the years, it was interesting to learn specifically about how different styles and different versions of typefaces can convey the specific roles of the words being set in those typefaces, so that users can just intuitively understand what is going on with the words when they see them in relation to other typefaces in the same document (or other application): just by looking, you can tell right away what the title or headline of a piece is, or that this separate block of text is a "pull quote" from the article, highlighting something that you will see in the context of the body of type, etc. etc. -- or at least, you should be able to, if the type system has been set up in a cohesive way to do so. 

Type is one of those things that is so ubiquitous in our society that it is easy to take everything about it for granted. But as soon as you start paying close attention to it, you begin to understand that there is a lot more going on than you might realize to make it easy to take it for granted!

UXD Principles and Concepts - Week 5 - Reflective Journaling

This week we began studying the basics of visual design, which took me back to my earliest days as a freshman art student at Kent State, taking the widely reviled art-major-required introductory class known as "VisOrg I," or "Visual Organization." It can be kind of difficult to read primer-type texts on subjects that you feel like you've studied intensively in the deep, dark past, almost like trying to appreciate a children's beginning reader about "Dick and Jane" and their dog Spot as fine literature. But the truth is, you never really stop learning about things like this once you start, and there are always things you may have forgotten about, or haven't thought about in a long time -- it's always worth being reminded of even the most basic elements of a discipline. 

Of the basic elements of which I was reminded this week, the one that really fascinated me was the concept of the "Golden Ratio." This ancient design concept has its roots in nature, and has been used by humans in designing all kinds of things, from the Parthenon in ancient Greece to web pages that haven't been released to the public yet. It ties together elements of math, biology, human psychology and visual perception in ways that almost blur the lines between science and magic, the way the Golden Ratio seems so often to be the perfect solution to design problems, to present a satisfying look and feel to things that humans are naturally attracted to. It almost seems like the kind of thing that cults develop around! But unlike alchemy or the pursuit of perpetual motion, the Golden Ratio is firmly based in hard science and math -- and so deeply rooted in nature as well, that of course we perceive it as completely natural when we encounter it in human-made design. I am definitely happy to have been reacquainted with this marvelous concept, and plan on investigating it further.

UXD Principles and Concepts - Week 4 - Reflective Journaling

One of the things that stuck with me in this week's readings came from the Designing With The Mind In Mind book by Jeff Johnson. Namely the section having to do with the "three brains" that humans have evolved to exist with -- which he calls 1) the old brain; 2) the midbrain; and 3) the new brain. I was vaguely familiar with this concept prior to reading about it here, but it was interesting to learn how these 3 differently-evolved areas of the human brain manifest themselves into what Johnson then calls the "two minds," which he entitles as "System One," comprising the activities of the "old brain" and the "midbrain," and "System Two," primarily run by the "new brain." 

The fact that we consciously exist and think in the front of our minds with the "System Two" new brain gives us the idea that this front-of-mind genius, basically who we consider our conscious identity/self ("me"), is the mind that is in control. But actually, we just think that because it's the mind with all the words that we hear ourselves thinking. While the "System Two" new brain is good at solving problems and thinking things through and figuring things out, it turns out that it is also significantly slower and less agile than the "System One" reptilian old- and mid-brains. The old- and midbrains have been with us much longer, evolutionarily speaking, and are tied to the things we need to have going for us in order to survive -- reflexes, speed, quick recognition of visual input, etc. But these attributes also help us with our daily activities whether we realize it or not. 

As far as UX design goes, the bottom line seems to be that we want to try to appeal most to the "System One" mind in users -- because that way, it makes users need to use their conscious, "System Two" new brain much less, which would only slow users down and make their usage of our designs seem much more difficult to them, since we'd be forcing them to have to "think" consciously, instead of just reacting by reflex and gut feeling. Our old- and mid-brains may not think in words slow enough for us to recognize, but their fleet-footed agility in reacting to things we have to deal with every day but don't want to have to actually consciously think about keeps us going and keeps us moving much more efficiently than we would otherwise.

UXD Principles and Concepts - Week 3 - Reflective Journaling

 This week's main assignment for us was entitled, "A Tiny Critique and Redesign." I guess it's considered "Tiny" because we were only dealing with one small element of a website, that being a dialog box asking for user input about how they want to monitor a chosen company on a corporate data research website. While the aspect of this website that we were asked to work on is indeed only a tiny part of what would no doubt be a quite robust site, I feel that I got quite a lot out of this assignment. 

Initially, I was somewhat frustrated. Mainly because the original dialog box that we were given to critique and redesign seemed to me to be a perfectly usable, standard, unremarkable kind of dialog box along the lines of any number of website dialog boxes that I am well familiar with from my years working as a private law firm research librarian. If I had encountered this dialog box in the course of doing my job as a research librarian, I doubtless would have thought nothing of it -- I would have just used it and gone on with my work. But being directed to take a thoughtful, close, analytical look at this common website user interface led me to think beyond the surface of the box, and questioning everything about it. 

I have to admit, I spent a lot of time thinking about this assignment; it really seemed to me that there was more to it than met my eye, and I found myself thinking about it even when I was in the middle of other completely unrelated activities throughout my week. It took me a few days to start to develop my theories of what I thought should or could be done with the design of this dialog box, and the more I thought about it, the more I questioned it, the wider my thinking about it became. I started considering not just the box itself and how it worked or how it presented itself to its users, but I also started thinking more and more about the users themselves (which, obviously, should have been among the first things I thought of, considering that we are studying user experience design!). I had what I felt was my biggest breakthrough in working on this redesign project one night while I was actually in the process of falling asleep in my bed: I was imagining being a corporate research worker, much like I had been for many years as a law librarian, and was thinking about their workflow in compiling and tracking corporate information as part of their job, and the kinds of things that on the surface may seem like small considerations but which wind up becoming major annoyances when having to repeat them again and again in the course of a day, a week, a career. Suddenly, as I was about to nod off, a light went off over my head and a great idea (I humbly thought at the time, though in retrospect it seems like an obvious common-sensical one) came to me that I thought would be the crowning touch in my redesign; something that I felt sort of "went the extra mile" in figuring out how to make this dialog box a much better feature of this website that would make its users' jobs just a little less annoying. After quickly sending myself a message with my idea so I wouldn't forget it overnight, I fell asleep content in the knowledge that I had finally resolved what I felt were the issues with this box. And feeling like, yes, maybe I actually can learn to work in the UX field! 

I guess my grade on the assignment will confirm for me (or not!) how bright that idea actually was...

UXD Principles and Concepts - Week 2 - Reflective Journaling

This second week of UXD Principles and Concepts, we were delving more into the psychology of design; how, in the phraseology of Don Norman, the way things are designed interact with their users by playing the role of providing "knowledge in the world," which helps to provide missing (forgotten or as-yet-unknown) precise "knowledge in the head" about the things they're interacting with. 

As such, it is important that we try to design things to most readily and easily facilitate communicating their intrinsic "knowledge" of how they work, as "things in the world," to their end users. To do this, it is important to understand the many ways that people's minds work when interacting with the world. This includes trying to foresee and provide alternatives for various difficulties and limitations that potential users may be bringing to their interactions with these things. Not everyone, as illustrated in the book Designing With the Mind In Mind, has the same full range of vision abilities, for example: it is important to keep in mind that some people have different kinds of color blindness, which may affect important aspects of the use of color in design. There are many other psychological aspects of the way human beings perceive their world and learn about the things they need to interact with in their daily lives: thus, it is necessary to have a good understanding of the processes by which people come to understand how to interact with designed objects in order to provide better-designed objects. 

One thing that has occurred to me this week, as I make my way through the early stages of learning about the field of UXD, is that a lot about UXD seems to basically stem from common sense. Which makes sense, because ultimately, we want to be able to design things that will work well for people by simply using their common sense. A funny thing about common sense, though, is that it isn't always obvious. Sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in complex workings of things, and get so bogged down in details or goals that haven't been fully considered and thought through, and we forget to take a step back and look at things with the fresh viewpoint of someone from outside all these complex inner workings who brings common sense to the project. 

UXD Principles and Concepts - Week 1 - Reflective Journaling

I am repurposing this blog for my first online class in User Experience Design (UXD) at Kent State University, UXD-60001: UXD Principles and Concepts. Considering I haven't posted anything here in 12 years, I don't think it will make much difference to anyone. 

In my first week of this class, I have largely been getting used to the whole scenario of taking an online college course. The last time I was in grad school, earning my MLIS from Kent State's School of Library and Information Science, it was the early 1990s, so all of this is a new experience for me. One interesting irony being that we are using websites to learn, essentially, how to make better websites; I have definitely already been feeling like some UX principles that we are learning about could have been better applied in the design of the websites we are using to learn them. 

Since this is the first week of the first course in a structured 2-year program, we have been concentrating on learning some of the very basic concepts that are dealt with in the UX field. How the form of an object can communicate to its user the ways in which that object can or should be used, and some of the ways in which this kind of communication can be better facilitated through better design. To understand this, we've been learning about how people acquire knowledge about the things they deal with, and how to plan for "meeting people where they are" with regards to making what is being designed easy, intuitive, and satisfying for people to use. 

I have already started to notice that I am noticing things more in my every-day activities where UXD could be applied to make things easier & better to use, or the differences in design of various websites and other objects that make some easier/better to use than others, and collecting potential helpful resources for future projects in this field. I am looking forward to getting more deeply into the inner workings of the various stages of UX Design, and how research in this field is done. I am also hoping that my abilities to cope with all of the online educational website things will quickly improve!