The NM4210 Experience

Designing for user experience has provided us with an insight into how products are developed to create a psychological linkage and a positive experience between the user and the product. Successful products are developed beyond its physical form and are no longer only functional entities to users. Users feel attached them and they become part of the users’ lives. Thus, understanding the users’ behavior and what they want is an important step in securing your products in the market. Of course the product developed has to be unique and usable to the consumers. However, achieving this requires a lot of user research and product testing to be done. This makes effective research and testing methodology an important factor in this field.


Module thoughts

After going through this module, I have gained a new perspective in the development process of products. The product development process’s main focus is not the product itself but the users that are going to use the product. However, most designers neglected this fact. By truly understanding the users, we can make out product more successful. I have understood the importance and difficulty of user research after all the projects and assignments in this course.

This course also let us understands that a product is beyond its physical and tangible form. The product experience starts before the point of purchase and it does not end when users have finished with the product. It leaves a certain image to its user, affecting their mood and feeling.

Frameworks such as Patrick Jordon’s four pleasures and Norman’s three level of design taught in this module has also been useful in analyzing users’ needs and emotions relating to these needs. Various techniques and methods in capturing user problems and requirements would be valuable for developing a product in the future too.

However, I find that the materials taught mainly focuses on the development of websites and computer systems. It is hard to apply some of it on development of a physical product like what we have done in the final project. But it does not mean that the materials taught are inappropriate as this module is a new media course. Thus, the focus is right but it would be good too add some insights on how these materials can be extended to the physical product.


Final Project - Kneon

The final project has been good applications of some of the techniques we have learn in this course. Though we are the only group that is creating a physical product, our final project is an interesting one. From conceptualizing of the alcoholic beverage to doing up the actual bottle drink, the development process is a difficult but a pleasurable one. It is also a new experience to me. And since this is a new media module, we also came up with a promotional website for the drink.

This website supposes to build up the image for our drink, Kneon and also serves as an information page for it. Although our project is about alcohol, we don't really go around tasting other alcohol for our market research. We ask our friends who are frequent drinkers and also pub waiters and waitress for their opinions about Kneon. However, the development process was not always smooth. There were good comments about Kneon as well as bad ones. Moreover, it is difficult to get the responses of users from only the exterior looks of the bottle and they cannot try the inner contents due to our lack of ability to create the drink. Thus, user testing could not be done on the drink itself.

Alhough rounds of user testing and evaluation have been done on the website, we cannot gurantee Kneon drink would be a success in the alcoholic market. All the evaluations are based on selected users and not the general public. Also, it takes time and money to maket and let users know Kneon. The product would only be considered a success when it achieve the objectives that we have set earlier. Thus, we cannot measure the effectiveness of our research and test results without testing Kneon in the real market.


Lessons learned

Creating an effective user experience is never easy. It involves various steps take we have done in this course. The focus is on the users themselves and thus having a well-defined primary target user is important. It sets the first step in structuring how your product is going to be. However, gathering information about the users is often faced with many problems. Even with existing tools and techniques in probing user behaviour, it is not possible to gather all the information about the user. There are always things that the user do not want to disclose or failure to capture some elements due to environmental factors. Users are always not themselves when you are "researching" on them.

Moreover, having a sufficient market research and a detail understanding of the users does not guarantee the success of the product. It only minimise the risk of the product becoming a failure in the market. Therefore, it is valuable to gain a good understanding of your target users and what they want from the product before releasing it. No company wants their product to be a failure after spending so much money and effort on it.

Another point that I have noted is that it is not possible to create a product that pleases everyone. When product designers want to capture a greater audience range, they try to add more functionality into their product. Unfortunately, this would be more confusing to the users and dilute the product objective. In this module, we learnt to create products that target the primary users we have defined and not everyone.

Lastly, good experiences with a product or brand do not last forever. Making users remembering the product is the first step to its success but it must grow with the users in order to ensure a lasting place in the their hearts.

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Learning Experiences in Lecture Theaters

In our investigation of finding out what really affects the learning experience in lecture theaters, my group have adopted the following three approaches in order to gather information about students' experiences in lecture theaters.

Cultural probes
We distributed to 3 volunteers each a few copies of a self-study worksheet. Our investigating subjects are asked to write down how they feel about their lecturer, their sitting spaces, whole environment and about the overall lecture. For the other pages, they are asked to write whatever they want about their lecture experiences. The subjects were asked to keep the worksheets for 2 days and record down the required information during their lectures. In order get the most open-ended responses, they are permitted to write about practically anything that they want to write about their lectures. Thereafter, the worksheets are returned to us for analysis. This method allow us to gather information on how the volunteers feel at any point of the lecture even thoughts before and after the lecture. However, this method is only effective when the volunteers records down everything they see, hear and feel.

Laddering Analysis
The purpose of the laddering is to find out extra factors that make students’ experience in the lectures pleasurable or non-pleasurable. This a narrower and less informative approach as compared to the cultural probe. The starting question of the approach is “How do you find lectures in NUS?”which aims to find out what students like and do not like about the lectures in NUS. We subjected 3 volunteers to the laddering process and recorded the responses for analysis.

Ethnographic Studies
Our ethnographic studies consists of 3 portions, interview, survey and lecture observation. The main purpose of these three methods is to find out the habits of students in lecture halls and find possible reasons and trends behind these actions that students do.

In the surveys and interviews we have structured our questions based on the following factors:

• Time
• Environment
• Place
• Other people interpretation
• Previous experience

Our results
The results we have collected are mainly about the environment of the lecture hall and teaching style of the lecturer. From the worksheet we have given out to the students, we found out that previous experience of the lecture effects the experience of the lecture. Furthermore, lecture experience does not only limited to lecture itself. It happens before on steps into the lecture hall.

From our observations, most people are distracted when opening the doors. They look in the direction of the person entering or exiting rather than looking at the lecturer. Furthermore, the doors make noise when opened. Those sit behind also tend to do their own things – eg: using laptops, talking more, fall asleep. This trend is more prominent in bigger lecture groups where students are further away from lecturers.

From the surveys and the interviews, we have gathered that most people find lectures boring and prefer a two way interaction style of learning such as lectures in seminar rooms where students can participate and interact with the lecturer. They also prefer the lecturer to use more videos and interesting methods of teaching and likes their sitting area to have more working and leg space.

Other presentations
Other presentations have also talked mainly about satisfying physiological needs of students is the key to improving their learning experiences. The group talking about "feng shui" have also said that the surrounding affects on one's "qi" (energy) which I would think is affecting a person's experience with that place. Thus, improving the environment and satisfying the physiological needs of the students would improve their learning experience.

Our studies is only limited to the students of NUS and the structure of the lecture halls are very much similar. One of the groups have extended their research to SMU. Their lecture halls are more suited for discussion and have much more pleasing design.

Possible solutions
The possible solutions would be to improve the environment of lecture theaters. Current hinge doors can be replaced with silent sliding doors and placed at the back of the lecture theaters to reduce distractions.

Time of the lecture is also an improtant factor. We have found out that most people favour the 12-2 lecture timeslot. The "feng shui" group have also stated that timing will affect the energy that a person has and affecting a person's learning experience. However, it is not possible to put all the lectures at the same timeslot. Thus, one possible solution is to give shorter lesson or more breaks during lectures for timeslots that are very early or late.

For the style of teaching of the lecturer, interaction between the students and the lecturer can be improved and more visual aids should be given in a lecture. Using of multimedia tools for teaching would give a greater impact to students and have a more pleasurable learning experience.

Four Pleasure Analysis of Ferlicia

User profile

Ferlicia Tan, 30, a new age career women who had a blissful marriage at the age of 28. She loves her husband, Daniel, who is a general manager in FastGo Pte Ld a car shipping firm owned by his family. Ferlicia herself owns a small design company which gives image consultation to small-medium enterprises in Singapore. She loves her work as a designer and a consultant and that is what she dream of doing all her life. She finished her studies in Sydney College of the Arts when she was 23 and started working as a interior designer. After a year, she resigned and really step out to set up her own designing firm with her friends. Three years later her career started taking off when her company was doing very well and she decided to expand it. She is brave and dare to take risks. This personality attributed to her success today.

Apart from being brave, she is wild and bold. She loves having fun, enjoys her life and likes to meet people. She often goes clubbing or to pubs for a drink with her friends and collegues. She would go to wine bars with her husband or spend the night at a friend's place chilling out. She loves to hang out with her friends, likes to go for parties and make alot of friends. She believes friends and social networks are important. She loves freedom and her marriage definitely have not stole the kind of freedom she wanted from her.

Among her friends, she is one of the most gorgeous and stands out from the crowd. Most importantly, she loves the feeling it. She has a very good taste for fashion and would try out any kind of clothes to make herself beautiful. To her, beauty is everything. Her life would be a boring one without the definition of aesthetics. Therefore, she spends a great deal of time shopping for clothes in shopping centres and boutiques. It also helps her to relax herself while shopping. However, her new closet is overflowing with her clothes that she have to hang them somewhere else.

Every monday and wednesday, Ferlicia would go for her private yoga class in order to keep her body in shape. To many people, Ferlicia had a perfect body. However, to her, it is far from perfect. She stays with Daniel in a huge house near Kembangan Mrt Station and she would go to the gym room in her house sometimes when she feels fat. At night, she would spend most of her free time maintaining her long hair and doing facial. She is a perfectionist when it comes to her perception of beauty.


Four pleasure analysis

Physio-pleasure :

• Ferlicia does yoga and goes to gym sometimes to keep her body in shape and to relex her mind. (Need pleasure)


• She does facial and maintains her hair at night to keep herself beautiful everyday. (Need pleasure)


• She does shopping when she has the time to keep up with the lastest fashion. This is like a hobby to her. (Appreciation pleasure)
  

Socio-pleasure :

• Ferlicia loves the company of her friends and husband. Her friends are important to her and she loves her husband. (Need pleasure)


• She likes to stand out from the crowd and being the center of attraction. (Appreciation pleasure)


• She loves meeting people and this may be due to her brave nature. This helps her to build up her social contacts beneficial to her business. She is socially active. (Appreciation pleasure)
  

Psycho-pleasure :

• She often goes out with her friends and tell her feelings to them. (Need pleasure)
  
• She loves her husband and his emotional support is most important to her. (Need pleasure)

Ideo-pleasure :

• Ferlicia thinks beauty is everything. Everything around her has to be beautiful. (Need pleaure)


• She believes in freedom and doing the things she wanted to do. (Need pleasure)
  

Product Benefit Specifications

When it comes to which type of handphone Ferlicia would buy, it would be definitely something that is sleek, beautiful and in fashion. The other look would be most important to her as she is very image conscious. She needs a phone that will match her image as a designer, a sophisticated women and able to be the center of attraction.

The functions of the phone would not be too important to Ferlicia. Apart from the basic functions, she would need functions that can help her in her highly active social life.

Introducing Nokia N76.

The outer design of the phone she needs would look something like the Nokia N76 phone as shown above. The phone's bright red colour attracts other people's attention which satisfy her
appreciation pleasure of being the center of attraction. The red colour also suits her character of being wild and bold. The phone's rounded edges and smooth contours suit her feminine self and would make her look in fashion and beautiful. This satifies her ideo-pleasure and socio-pleasure needs.

Apart from the basic functions of normal phones, what she needs is a good camera with good night shot capability as she likes to go for parties at night. The Nokia N76 phone has a two mega pixel camera and a memory of 2GB with expendable external memory. This allows her to store her happy memories of gatherings with friends and her sweet times with her husband in the phone. It would also be a good tool for her to remember faces of people when she goes out to meet new people and clients. The MP3 playing function allows her to listen to music while doing yoga or gym, statisfying her physio-pleasure need.

In addition, the phone should have emailing capability where she can email to her friends and clients whenever neccessary. This way, she would not be desk-bounded to a computer, enabling her to do the things she wanted and satisfying her freedom ideology. Everything would be just a touch away and hassle-free.

In general, the phone would be beautiful in terms of its looks as well as its functions to Ferlicia, statisfying her ideology of being beautiful is everything.

:)

Pleasure with Products - Emotional Designs

This time round, the task is to find 3 products and describe how my brain percieve those products according to the 3 different levels of brain processing - Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective.

Visceral design: refers primarily to that initial impact, to its appearance.

Behavioral design: is about look and feel, the total experience of using a product - the physical feel/pleasure and effectiveness of use.

Reflective design: is about ones thoughts afterwards, how it makes one feel, the image it portrays, the message it tells others about the owner's taste.

Quoted from Reddy's slides :)

What I have chosen is people wear most of the time - Reading glasses.


Product 1 :

Solid gold lorgnette. It is a combination of a clock, a miniature violin and a pair of reading glasses and part of the British Optical Association (BOA) Museum Collection.

Visceral design: Old antique look. Solid gold gives it a priceless look (indeed it is). The design is unique and exquisite. Good for display but not very in fashion to use it.

Behavioral design: It a two-in-one clock cum spectacle design. However i doubt the clock is still working. User have to hold on to the handle before he/she can use it to read anything; not very practical.

Reflective design: It's a antique collection of the BOA Museum. Owning it would definitely make you feel good even it is just for display. It gives the image that the owner has good appreciation for antiques.

Product 2 : The flexible frame reading glasses has frames that are designed to flex, allowing them to restore to an original shape when they are subjected to rough handling or their shape is susceptible to being deviated. It has detachable bridge and arms, allowing them to be reglazed with updated lenses.

Visceral design: Design not very pleasing to the eye. The frame is too colourful and design does not gain my interest in buying this product.

Behavioral design: Its flexible frame allows rough handling of the spectacle. As the spectacle returns to its original shape, it does not go out of shape. Thus, it is more durable. Detachable arms and bridge allows users to change the lens when they are required to.

Reflective design: It is a simple spectacle frame from the roadside store. Owning it doesn't make one feel proud or excited.

Product 3 :Brandless High Fashion Unisex frame

Visceral design: Colourful frame makes it visually pleasing and vibrant. Thick plastic frame spectacles are in fashion and makes one look younger.

Behavioral design: Cannot be adjusted to fit to the shape of your face. It is bulky and heavier than normal spectacles. It slips down the nose easily and have to adjust it constantly if the user have a oily face. Can be very fustrating to use as it keep slipping.

Reflective design: It is not from a famouse brand but the design is in fashion. Those who are into fashion are wearing it and so it makes people wants to buy it. It gives a image that the user is in fashion and not old fashion.

In my opinion, glasses are very functional products and also part of a person's face. It either makes you look good or look bad. People wear glasses all the time and thus glasses are important in its design as well as its functionality and usability. Therefore, the three emotional design aspects have to be taken care of carefully to make a pair of spectacles a good sales product.

:)

Bad Designs - Webpages

When is the last time you had problems looking for the information you want or navigating through a website? It is definitely fustrating for users to look through hundreds of links to locate the information they want in a particular webpage. Users of the internet wants information instantly at a click away, providing them the convinence they want. However, sometimes users could have a hard time looking for what they want.

My friend, CS, told me he had a hard time looking through SingTel's webpages when he was looking for information about SingNet's broadband connection. His response on the website was that it was too complicated and overloaded with information. This made his search difficult. Although there is a search function available, he would still need to go through every entry to find information he wanted. Disappointed by the webpage, he concluded that the customer service side wasn't as good as he had expected earlier and he agreed that this would construct a bad image for SingTel if the website wasn't properly set up. Hearing this i decided to go in and take a look at the website myself.

When I first got into SingTel's home page, it gave me a professional feel and the red color portion of the page caught my attention. However, when I start looking into the details,
I was overwhelmed by the huge amount of information infront of me. I did not know where to start with. The whole page is full of links! Moreover, some of those links are repeated and goes to the same page.


After a short while, I gave up looking through all the links and click on a randomly selected link. Unfortunately, I came to another page full of links again. There are also no clear header stating which page I am at. I went back to the home page and tested out more of the links. There are two homepage links at the main page but both goes to a different page. I was confused and did not know which is the real "home page".

After going through a few links I came across this page
This page is inconsistent with the other Singtel pages. It has two independent scrollbars, one for the left navigation panel and one for the main content area. Users in this case have to scroll the scroll bars individually to look through all the contents of each panel which becomes very inconvenient for them. In addition, in the main content area, most of the images are animated, each trying to catch the users' attention. However, to me, these images are distracting my focus one other areas, rather than attracting my attention.

Overall Singtel's pages have been clean and professional. However, there is too many navigation panels per page which may confuse users. Proper guidance should be provided on the page. User should have a good mental picture of the website, its linkages and how to go forward and back to its pages so as to make its usage easier. Returning users of the page should immediately know where to look for the information they want and not search all over the place again.

Finally, having a good website definitely brings a good image to its brand name. Users would be able to achieve their objectives on the website with as little time as possible. Especially when users face problems with thier products; they would want to seek help and solution as fast as possible. Websites that are complex and hard to navigate would result in fustrated users and end up with users having a bad experience with the brand. Eventually, having a good relationship with customers is an important factor to keep old customers as well as to attract new ones.

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What is user experience design?

Here's a brief intro to user experience design. Basically, user experience design (UX) refers to the overall satisfaction and experience during the process of interacting with a product.

Alot of us may have bad experiences with products due to bad designs and functionality bugs. Insufficient clues on how to use a product would definitely cause inconvenience to us. It also creates a bad mental image about the brand. As a result, we tend to lose confidence in that brand. Thus, the chances for us to return to that brand of goods would be low.

<---- would you use soap that look like this? http://www.nopeitssoap.com/

Remember, bad news usually spreads faster than good ones. People would tell 10 person about a bad product and only tell 1 person about a good product. Thats what i was told in my marketing lecture a few semesters ago and its very much true. Generally, good design sells, while bad design will continue to stay on the shelves. Therefore, sufficient usability tests should be done on a product before releasing it to the market.

Technological advances have made things easier but at the same time have increase the complexity of things. In the end consumers still favours need, simple, easy to use designs. Therefore, product designers please spare us from those complicated, brain cracking designs and don't make our lives difficult buy introducing hard to use products.

For more information, you can refer to http://www.paradymesolutions.com/articles/what-is-user-experience-design/ or some of the UX links I have provided on the right panel.
:)