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.