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...
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