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.