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Week 7: User Experience Versus Market Research

This week was a great week for applying design principles to a UX project that we will be doing a lot in the future: user personas. I had done many of these target member profiles in advertising, so I felt like it was going to be simple. While I did really enjoy the assignment, I also saw that there is a significant difference between this step in user experience and in advertising. At least, it seems that in user experience design, you are more aware of aspects of design than in advertising. While we built user personas in the past that were meant to look aesthetically pleasing, I found myself concentrating much more on the smallest details of the design. What type system am I using? Is every typeface consistent in its use? Am I effectively using a grid system to design my persona? While I had written many in advertising, it seems like the user persona in UX is as much of an artwork as the final design. Every step of this process should follow the overall desire for pleasing aesthetic...
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Week 6: The Power of Typography

This week's focus on typography was fascinating to me. I had studied very similar points in the past in my bachelor's, but in particular, our assignment gave me a powerful new insight into how motivating, for better or for worse, type can be. In designing my own type system, I had to think very consciously about why each font should be chosen. In what medium will this be used? What is the purpose of this specific font? How should the heading font function compared to the body copy font? In designing it, I discovered just how powerful type can be in drawing me in to a website or publication. It was amazing to me how quickly badly selected type renders an article devoid of credibility, frustrating to read, and in essence just a terrible mess to try to focus on. On the other hand, a cohesive type system very naturally draws you in, pulls you to the most significant details while easing your reading experience. Even in just looking at the dummy text example from our presentation, I...
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Week 5: Seeing Without Fully Understanding

This week was a focus on the design principles, and I was struck by how much of this is intuitive to the user. When we look at a bad website, we don't think, "That hierarchy is amazingly designed. The golden ratio is clearly what was used to create this logo." We don't understand, but our senses intuitively are drawn to those things that follow our design principles and reject those things that do not. In effect, the user has already assigned an evaluation to your product before using it. While using it may be enough to overcome a bad initial evaluation, it also may not be able to. I just find it fascinating how instinctual this study is, and how by perfecting what we do to improve the design, the more we tap in to that subconscious that is first deciding if we trust this website or product. When I have designed in the past, some has been based on actual rules, but some has just been me trying to judge what looks good versus what does not. By learning these principl...
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Week 4: The Old Brain

I really enjoyed this week's readings and assignment. Specifically, I found myself very intrigued by the power of the old brain over our actions. The textbook talks earlier about how we are distinguished from other creatures by the development of the second system of our brain, moderated by logic and rational thinking. The book talks about how the second system is where our consciousness exists, and thus that system believes it is often in control. However, more likely than not, it is our system one, motivated by emotion, survival, or instinct, that is calling the shots. I was intrigued by that because we are so unaware of that happening. Specifically, I got to thinking how that affects users in UX Design. Most of us, when on a website or purchasing an item or using a product, feel we are acting completely logically and rationally because our consciousness recognizes that as its driving instinct. However, if our book is correct, then much of our decisions even then are motivated ...
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Week 3: My First Critique

More than anything, what stuck out this week was getting to our concepts into practice with our first critique and redesign assignment. To start, we broke down one small, small part of a website: a dialogue box. It was one very small aspect, and yet I was shocked by how much thought and strategy went in to planning just that dialogue box. Just at first glance, it seemed like the box was good enough. But user experience design is not about good enough. I found myself trying to analyze everything that a user could be thinking, feeling, or looking for when viewing that box. Not only was I able to completely reconfigure the dialogue box, I was able to include more information that the user may need. Obviously, it was far from a perfect redesign. But even just practicing gave me a new feeling of confidence and excitement in user experience design. I feel like I am that much more capable of being able to combine strategy and creativity into an excellent product. Just being able to jump in ...
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Week 2: Many Different Points of View

This week we got to dig deeper into the psychology and rules of user experience design, which was fascinating to me. What fascinated me most, however, was the outcome of an assignment we had to do. We each had to find one bad and one good example of UX design, and I chose Amazon as my positive example. In my mind, I have been so thrilled by their simple check-out and service that in my mind, Amazon seems to define top-tier user-focused design. However, one of the other students used Amazon as their negative example. I was surprised at first, but understood as I read. She was focusing on using Amazon specifically to watch Amazon Videos, and described how the patterns are not set up to make that process intuitive. I have had the same issue on Amazon, in fact, but primarily use it for shopping, so that user problem just never concerned me that much. This just shows how important it is at the very beginning AND throughout the entire product development process to utilize user testing to ...
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Week One: Intro to User Experience

This week was my first week in the master's program for User Experience Design at Kent State, and even just at this point, it was a blast! After considering a few different areas for study, it was fun to dive into UX and get really excited for it. Specifically, this blog is meant to be a collection of thoughts as I go through the program. What stood out to me more than anything in this first week was the wide variety of focuses and interests that bring people to user experience design. In our first class alone, we have people coming from information science, graphic design, web design, computer science, and I'm coming from advertising strategy. Even so, every different background has offered connections to user experience design that appealed to us and gave us the step we needed to join the UX world. All so different, and yet all part of user experience design. I was amazed just how critical user experience design is throughout the entire product creation process, in so many ...
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