Final Overview

This module has been a fruitful experience for me in learning about experience design.
One important lesson that I have learned is that experience design cannot be learned
just by studying theories and conducting user researches. Rather, to learn experience
design is somewhat akin to attaining enlightenment (as fondly mentioned by Mr Reddy in
class) where one uses his experience, instinct and creative sense to really understand
the WAY of designing experiences. However, theories and user researches are nontheless
useful in a sense that they can guide us and aid us to a certain extent in the design process. On this note, let's recap the important take home ideas I have learnt in the weekly lessons.

Class 1: Introduction

We were introduced to the term UX design and how it is different from UI design. UX
design is popular now because it focuses on consumers needs which can be summarised by
functionality needs, usability needs and pleasure needs.

Class 2: UX Methodology

In this lesson, we focus on emotion and design. we learn that human emotion results
from 3 different levels of brain processing:

• Viseral : affects first impression and impact we have about a product
• Behavioural : affects the look, feel and experience of using the product
• Reflective : The thoughts of using a product, how it reflect the taste of the users

Class 3: Understanding Users

We were taught how to perform reverse market analysis where we construct a user
profile based on a product given. The four pleasure framework (Physio, Socio, Pyscho
and Ideo) also allow us to analyse a user's needs from different aspects and to
identify their requirements for a certain product.

Class 4: Understanding Users 2

In this lesson, we learnt about different methods to study users which include
cultural probe, laddering and ethnographic study. These methods allows us to
understand our users and indentify areas that the users find most important in using a
product.

Class 5: Marketing

Here we study experience design from the perspective of marketing. The 22 immutable
laws of marketing revealed various ways to boost experience designing like using the
law of category to set up a new market and being the leader of that market. We also
learned how to construct an experience event matrix that categorise the needs and
expectations of a consumer.

Class 6: Branding

Branding allows users that trusts that particular brand to buy its products without
worrying (even doing less research before buying). We also learned about the halo
effect which essentially says that people have better impression of beautiful things.

Class 7: Phase 1 Discover

In this lesson, we have to start thinking about what product we are creating and why
we are creating it. We also have to draft out the customers need analysis, the brand
and the business insights/objectives. Instead of defining the product immediately, we
have to identify a problem first. From there, we need to work out the underlying
causes of the problem and design a product to fix it.

Class 8: Phase 2 Define

After the discover phase, we had to define the user and draw out their profiles. Next
we create personas for our users. We were also warned of the functionality trap where
in the design process, the functions of the product keep on increasing due to user's
desire and wants.

Class 9 - 12: Phase 3 Design

This is where we start designing the product after researching and constructing the
user profiles.

For the first stage, we had to think of what functionalities our products will
encompass. After that we have to do a content inventory and perform methods like card
sorting to organise our information architecture.

The second stage is where we draft out a low fidelity prototype for our product. The
low-fi prototype provides a cheap and fast way to test our designs and perform initial
heuristics evaluation of our product.

The third stage requires us to build a hi-fi prototype which is a detailed
representation of the final product. HEre we learned about Berlyne's model of
aesthetics which predicts a cyclical process on how people view about aesthetics.
We also learned how to do usability testing through heuristic evaluation and user
testing methods (Think aloud, co-discovery). These allows us to improve our product
and indentify possible flaws in our design.

Overall, this course has taught me much about creating experience. Beforehand, I was
only aware of product design which focuses on the object. Experience design is much
more in a sense that it encompass the entire user experience in using the product.