Hey 2nd Week of Product Design Class

Source: Susan Yang — http://4rtgallery.blogspot.com/2012/09/optical-illusions-by-oleg-shuplyak.html

This is totally unrelated, but Mad o! Thanks to my Product designer tutor, Dumms, I’ve been saying ‘mad o’ all week (‘mad o’ is a Nigerian slang that depicts excitement over something). Talk about influence, lol.

We kicked off our class by presenting our group assignment for the week which was to identify a problem in our environment that we’d like to create a solution to. My team and I identified the problem of finding a verified charitable organisation to fund based on a particular preference. For example, using a proto persona, Amaka is a working millennial that is looking for a way to give back to the community. She doesn’t want to go the route of giving alms to roadside beggars because these are strange times and people pretend and might not truly be in need or are just outright lazy and resolve to begging as a quick way out. She is also sceptical about just giving to just any NGO. There are so many ‘NGOs’ these days and it’s hard to know which is actually doing a good cause.

There are over 1000 charity organizations in Nigeria, however, there is little to no means to easily donate to these organizations. Our solution was to create an application that encompasses all the charity organizations and charity homes in Nigeria and offers a safe and convenient way to make donations. Also, a verification process would be available to enable the users to identify the credible ones.

What was the feedback on our Presentation?

A great presentation in general but we moved too quickly in terms of already determining to build an application. Building an application is great but then you need to back this up with adequate primary research.

Let’s Dive into the meat of the day

User Experience (UX) Design

User Experience (UX) Design is the process used to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users.

It’s important to know what UX isn’t.

1. UX design is not design thinking — Repeat after me, lol. You can’t take a design thinking course and think, oh now I’m a UX designer. Nope. It doesn’t work that way, sorry to break it to you.
2. Having a lot of sticky notes on the wall doesn’t make you a great designer.
3. UX is not graphic or web design.

All the point mentioned above influence UX but it is not the totality of UX.

Importance of UX Design

UX design is the process used to create products that provide meaningful and relevant user experience. E.g it can be as simple as designing a product that makes people happy — Tiktok. Tiktok creates entertainment for its users.

The main aim of creating a product is to solve a problem.

What you need to do to create a good UX is to spend time with your user to understand their journey. Why do they take certain actions on a product. From spending time with your user you build empathy. To be a user-centric designer, you need to build a relationship with the user.

Sub-Disciplines of UX Design

1. Information Design: It enables you to know how to structure things that also aesthetically pleasing. If the information is not well structured, you can overwhelm the user and eventually lose their interest in the product or whatever information you want to display. Design in sizeable chunks and makes it easily accessible.
2. User Experience Strategy: Thinking about the whole picture. How to design for easy penetration into the market or how do we design better than our competitor?
3. Interaction Design: What happens when a user clicks on a specific thing. What is their feedback?
4. Service Design: Service design is done to meet both the user and customer’s need. A user is a patroniser of your platform. A customer is still shopping through your platform and seeking for a platform to trust.
5. User Research: This research is done to understand people (user). User research can be done in form of a survey, usability test, etc.
6. Visual Design: This aims to shape and improve the user experience through illustrations, photography, typography, etc.
7. UX writing: Focuses on words and how to capture the users’ attention through keywords. Consistency with words is key. It needs to be clear and easily understandable.

Gestalt’s Principles of Perception

Gestalt’s theory was formed by a German Psychologist. The word Gestalt means form or shape. The ideology behind Gestalt’s principle is that humans perceive groups of objects as patterns rather than individual objects.

Here are some of the Principles we learnt about and their applications:

1. Law of Similarity: The Law of Similarity states that when objects are grouped together they tend to assume the same functionality.
2. Law of Proximity: The Law of Proximity states that objects that are close to each other are more related than objects that are far apart.
3. Law of Proximity: The Law of Proximity states that objects that are close to each other are more related than objects that are far apart.
4. Law of Closure: The Human brain tends to form a complete image of missing parts of an image in order to make it recognisable. We combine parts to form a simpler whole.
5. Law of Common Region: The Law of Common Region states that items within a boundary are perceived as a group and assumed to share some. common characteristic or functionality.
6. Law of Continuity: The Law of Continuity states that the human eye follows lines, curves, or a sequence of shapes in order to determine a relationship between design elements.
7. Law of Multi-Stability: This is the perception that an image can actually seem to be two images at once.
8. Law of Pragnanz: The Law of Pragnanz states that when presented with a set of ambiguous or complex objects, your brain will make them appear as simple as possible.

Want to see my presentation on the application of Gestalt’s Principle? — Click HERE