My UX Enlightenment

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 ...

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 ...