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.