Thoughts

User-experience is a specialized topic which i feel that is unique and different from the other design topics that i studied in the past few years in NUS.

why did i say that? Design has always been with the product – how good is it, how practical is it, what feelings does it give out, among other things. Rarely does the design process includes the user himself – where the user comes from, what he does for a living, how does he live out his life, and his life experiences before being shown and able to interact with the product. such prior experiences help to shape the overall experience that the user feels when finally shown the product, and should be taken into account.

I feel that design is too large to encompass into a single topic – much like science, where there are simply too many things to explore. however, science always concentrates on the numbers and data – design like art is always subjective and hard to document, if at all. Hence, science can be taught in textbooks because the numbers never change, but design has to be taught in form of experiences – one which is not easy to note nor pass down to apprentices. Its all feelings – and for that we can only provide general guidelines so that one recreates the environment that can only give a general sense of happiness, and even when we do its a large amount of effort used, whether in marketing, design, or simply society conforms, where everything a person experiences contributes to his or her “being” which affects his or her attitude towards a product. no wonder companies have to pay big for such developments.

all in all, i feel that i have learnt a lot about human behavior in the module, and the many things that encompasses a person’s emotion, and some of the factors that eventually boil down to whether the user would like a product or not. the information that i gathered throughout the course cannot be taught from a textbook and thus are invaluable.

Smoke and Mirrors

i agree with Christopher Fahey that experience design is a intuitive process and not one which can be “engineered” and the essence discovered and reproduced in a lab. User experience is first and foremost different for each user and each user experience a different kind of feeling or goodness that simply varies largely to have calculations and heuristics accomplish more than a general direction. As we learnt in the previous months, user experience cannot be made, only simulated. We cannot generate happiness in a person, as that is not possible. However, we try to create the environment that will somehow induce happiness in the person. This environment varies per culture and in situations which are, for now, too complex to compartment into a theory.

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Christopher Fahey claims in the second page where eyetools “seeks to give the impression that without the eyetracking studies we (and the site’s owners) would have no idea how or if each design was working.” User experience is largely unknown although there are a lot of research being done in it. EyeTools is simply another tool that shows the results of the designer’s hard work out to people who do not know the theories behind each item’s placement, and to allow a qualitative measure as to how successful each design is compared to another for instance. Christopher Fahey is not wrong is saying that intuitively the designers and the site’s owners would know if a design is “working” or not, but like i said, EyeTools should be used among other tools to determine the effectiveness of a design, and even then, the costs of using the tools might not warrant using them at all.

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EyeTools is a product that, when used in the correct way, would give a qualitative measure to the qualities of a design, which “a good UI designer (…) would come up with without the aid of any tools, just going by their design instincts.” Eyetools is simply yet another tool that one may choose to use or not. A very good UI designer, which Christopher would say, would not need any of these tools at all. However, someone who pays the money, or those who lack the good design instincts, or simply for documentation reasons, would need hard facts like what actually happens and how does this particular design work. Like the third part of the article, the tools inform the more uninitiated of the effects of any one design, which a knowledgeable designer would already know in his mind.

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User experience is costly to research and implement, as we can see from the large amounts of money that companies invest. Innovations like the persona rooms as indicated are simply an early version of the prototype that they have come up with, and things might change in the future, which need not include physical rooms themselves. The idea of needing to have something “physical” and tangible, like a room or numbers that add-up, is kind of in-built into people from science and mathematics, – something subjective like design is like art – one cannot quite put a finger to why a picture is good or not, but just is. People want to see tangible results and not “it feels better” in a report, which i think is what the tools that are implemented are trying to use. this is a problem with the mindset of society if any.