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!