Week 3 - Design & Strategy

In todays class we will be looking at design and strategy, and how we can create solutions for the problems that we have come across in our user research for our project. We are now onto the ‘define’ stage of the design process, where we hone in on the problem before we move forward.

Defining The Problem

It is so important to make sure that we are building the right thing. This is not up to the developers but the designers to ensure that before valuable resources get used, we know what problem we are trying to solve. The define stage starts with a simple sentence that defines what the problem is. In class we wrote down what the problem is that we will be looking at when it comes to our project, this was to have clarity as to what the purpose is of our product.

How Might We

The next stage is to create a ‘how might we’ statement, where we restate the problem but with ‘how might we’ in front of it. Creating these will help us to understand and hone in on the solution that we will be trying to achieve.

How might we help students concentrate in class

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Frame Your Design Challenge

We then had an exercise that IDEO had originally created. This was the ‘Frame your design challenge’, where we used the research that we had found and used it to answer 6 questions. Doing this helps us to know what we are trying to design, by considering the problem, how we might do it, some solutions, what our desired outcome is, and what some of the constraints are that we might come across when we put ourselves in the users context.

Key Outcome: To improve students concentration levels by improving health and lifestyle

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Context/Constraints:

App can't distract from class time
Broad range of lifestyles that students have
Needs to be free as students don't have excess money to spend </aside>

Second Version: How might we help students concentrate in class by creating a routine and fostering a healthy lifestyle

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Design Kit

Hick’s Law

“The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.”

This law is another staple in UX design. We must try to minimise the amount of choices the user has when it comes to decision making. We can make the cognitive load more bearable by breaking complex tasks into steps, highlighting recommended options, or simply getting rid of elements that are necessary. Making content digestible is so important as we don’t want the user getting overwhelmed with the amount of information on the screen at once. An example of Hick’s law that came to mind was when I was designing my SDG app last semester. Since I was covering a lot of information about goal 3, I created a different page for each target. This helped to organise the content and make it less daunting for the user to navigate it. For example, any information about target 3.2 wasn’t shown until the user selected target 3.2.

Target mockup.png

Dark Patterns

Dark patterns are what companies do to trick people into doing thing that they don’t want to do. In the UX world this happens, and is usually done so subtly that we may not notice most of the time. An example given was that a box required to be ticked to unsubscribe to a newsletter, when we normally tick a box to subscribe, not unsubscribe. Another example was how difficult Amazon makes it for a user to delete an account. This is done on purpose and stems from the fact that they are putting the business needs in front of the user needs. Dark patterns are commonly used by manipulating colour, text, and navigation. Although they aren’t illegal, as designers we must be honest in our work.