In today’s lecture we’re moving onto the “Define” stage of our design process. This is where we narrow down and find issues within the university sector that need fixing, from this we can find a problem statement and develop a brief. I quite enjoyed the “Frame Your Design Challenge” which was created by IDEO.
Upon research I discovered a lot of things but one that really stood out to me was students struggling with their finances due to the financial crisis; this led to me diving deeper to try and uncover more. It is important to define the problem as this helps mind map solutions, because this helps us build the right product for those who need it.
The next step of the design strategy is finding out ways to solve the issue we’ve come across. The exercise was very fun and insightful; seeing what my peers were up to was interesting and motivating as per usual.
UXD303 Week 3: design and strategy
IDEO partnered with NYU to address how first year students face an overwhelming amount of communications. Students struggled to access essential information due to them receiving 70+ emails a day.
This was solved by shadowing students on campus pop-ups, and cross-departmental workshops, this revealed that despite NYU having copious resources, they were poorly organized. This was fixed by creating a more unified communication strategy, reducing redundancy and making resources more accessible.
What I took from this is that engaging with users in real life uncovers authentic pain points. And sometimes its best to just take what's already available and make a few changes to it
New York University | Student-Centered Solutions
This law explains that as designers we should minimise the number of choices a user encounters on an interface, too many choices can lead to a user avoiding the product due to them becoming frustrated or overwhelmed; it is best to break things down into small chunks as to avoid them becoming overwhelmed. The idea is to get rid of anything that doesn’t help the user accomplish their goal without it feeling like it’s a task.
Today’s class was very insightful, uncovering what dark patterns are and how they are a flaw in many products was very interesting, one we went over was how Amazon makes it difficult for their users to cancel their account. Throughout my research I also uncovered that many students face this when it comes to finding information regarding their university. When making my product I will make sure to stay away from overcomplicating things so students don't feel like they're performing a task when using the app.