Final Project; My Reflections

I've just finished compiling our final report.

Mentally going through the process of Discovering needs, Defining our target users, Designing our prototypes, to User Evaluating our prototypes as I read the report, I suddenly realized that amount of effort that has been put into "trying" to create successful UX designs; I say "trying" because you can never tell if your design will work until the users really use it. And even if it works for now, it may not work forever.

Going through all the researches and designing, researches and redesigning, I feel the effects of design being a wicked problem; it is an endless cycle of designing and redesigning to improve it further. And having to take the users' perspectives into consideration makes it even more wicked to the point of being impossible. It means that UX designers needs to be acutely aware of their users (through means of research or otherwise) in order to perform their job well.

As a novice designer, sometimes I got lost in the process of designing and failed to recognize that the design is actually what I wanted and not what the users wanted. This is dangerous as it will mean that the final design will not be accepted by the users.

Besides taking the users into consideration while designing the product, good UX designers I realized should also be able to take the users into consideration when designing their user researches. For example, in the case of the cultural probe we carried out in our project, the respondents will not be able to fully utilize a probe pack that consists of a camera as the camera is not allowed in their military camps.

From doing this project, I feel that it is impossible to ensure positive user experience throughout the whole usage of the product. The thing about experience is that it is too subjective. What a designer can attempt to do is perhaps to micro-manage the whole usage process by breaking down each stages of the usage process into tiny parts and then design to meet the requirement of these parts. While this may sound easy, the difficulty comes in when the designer has to piece this parts together to form the whole design; the parts has to be well connected to ensure a smooth process of usage. At this point, I am suddenly reminded of the analogy about enlightenment that Mr Reddy told us.

He said that there are 3 stages in enlightenment. The first stage is to recognize that there is a mountain. The second stage is to recognize the elements e.g. the rocks, the trees, etc., on the mountain. The last stage is to recognize how these elements come together to form the whole mountain.

Using the analogy, I believe good UX designers are those who are able to see how every small part relates to the whole experience of using the product. It's a tough job indeed.

Overall, the whole project is an excellent experience for novice designers like me as it provides me with real life experience that will aid me if I do decide to persist on in this field.

Right now, I will just appreciate the good designs in my life and be thankful to the designers.