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.