Week 6 was a very exciting type of change when learning new things as it took a turn from the likes of Typography, Grids, and Colour and this week put all focus on the meaning of User Interface and User Experience design.
Starting with the use and meaning of User Experience. From common knowledge I knew that the UX design was to create a satisfying experience for the use of the users to make their lives easier. In other words, to focus on the people who are likely to use the creation rather than creating it for the owner who may not use it.
What I learned in communicating a project to achieve a successful UX I learned a couple of steps that would help me find good features to include in a good design.
These keywords were:
Who it’s for?
Understand their needs
Find the right problem
Everything has a system
Validate design decisions
To help these keywords in particular finding a problem most issues that come to redesigning a UI/UX of an existing site stems from a current problem. I learned that a way to help me as the designer to make my life easier is to help redesign the problem. By achieving this I watched the YouTube video titled ‘Clarifying the '5 Whys' Problem-Solving Method.’ This video focused on how effective it is figuring out the answer to each why which would eventually lead me to the root of the problem.
Clarifying the '5 Whys' Problem-Solving Method
Finally, one of the last things I learned in this area when creating a satisfying UI/UX was to do my own primary research before jumping into a design. For example, I learned that it would be more beneficial to go straight to the target audience and see how they would use an application to help my own future design projects.
Another aspect I learned this week is how useful design thinking frameworks would help with future projects. For example, the double diamond process is an extremely simple layout through and through, easy to understand and provides a step by step guide on each milestone I should achieve before moving on to the next.
Overall, this area was more of a recap of the previous couple of class that covered what elements should be included within User Interface design such hierarchy, spacing, typefaces, colours. However, what I did learn in was the use the history of icons within computing, how they came to be and how they have been used.
To get started, we talked about that computer icons were created in a similar fashion to their real world counterparts, to help the users know how they can be used. For example, the trash icon was a bin to let people know that any items that need deleted can be moved into that. Another example, would be the folder where all documents the user may want stored in one place can be dragged and dropped in to that folder.
