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General Assembly: Intro to UIUX Talk by Oscar Venhuis (3 Mar 2020)

I attended this virtual user interface and user experience talk by Oscar Venhuis from General Assembly. The topic was an introduction to UI UX.

My takeaways from his lecture is similar to what i have been reading online and from school, but packaged well in a 1hr+ talk with additional insights. The first key insight i learnt is that experience goes beyond the physical product or service. This applies aptly to the virtual environment and often overlooked aspects of UI UX as it is those subtle details and considerations that are designed and engineered that makes the physical product or service of that quality. 

I also learnt about the differences between UI and UX, where: 

1. Ui is the presentation and interactivity

2. Ux is how the user engages with the product

3. Ux is the "end result" of the UI

4. Usability -> degree of accomplishing goal

5. UX -> delightful experience throughout (valuable, desireable, useful, credible, accesible)

Later on in the talk, we did a practice by going to Craiglists to walk through whether it is good UX and followed the task flow as such:

1. Go to craiglist

2. Find a one bedroom apartment

3. Anchorage alaska

4. Less than 1000/month

5. Allows dogs

After going through the task flow, some observations are drawn from the exercise. Even though not the website is not visually appealing: very usable because efficient and clear. Oscar went on to explain how this demonstrates the usability aspect of design outside of ‘aesthetics’.

The talk was also about the Ux design process (5 design process that we learnt in lecture), methods on how to conduct design process and how to conduct interviews. Intriguingly, open ended questions are better questions to ask rather than focus on specific instances.

Lastly, Oscar stressed on that problem statements are iterative and several rounds of development of the problem can help the designer get a clearer and fuller picture of the problem itself, which helps to cover more grounds and ensures a more all-rounded approach to working out a solution.

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Assignment 2: Post 4

This was the final week of our group project where my group and I presented the final redesign for the LumiNUS mobile application. We worked on turning the research and survey data of users into a user persona and basing of it, we managed to produce a wireframe as well as a low-fidelity prototype to better demonstrate how this proposed design could address the issues of the current design.

After our presentation as well as watching the other groups’ presentation, i reflected that perhaps it would have been clearer if our group spent more resources and expanded upon the user research’s breakdown and analysis, as it could have provided clearer feedback and consequently a more accurately generated user profile, which would further refine our proposed design. Looking back, our group also did not have the time to go through multiple iterations of user research and low-fidelity prototyping, which would have aided in clearer and more refined results, thereby serving as better foundation for the subsequent stages such as mid-fidelity prototyping and high-fidelity prototyping. Nevertheless, the lack of adherence to the iterative process due to tight time constraints can be seen as mirror to the mobile design process in the real world where deadlines given by clients are tight, thus it is a learning point as well.

Going forward into the individual project, perhaps this iterative process should still be done but kept to a minimum number of iterations to both reap the benefits of the iterative process as well as adhering to the time constraints of the project.

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Assignment 2: Post 3

This week, my group and i have managed to narrow down the general inconvenience and problems that the users of the LumiNUS mobile application face, as well as listing a few pain points of the application design that we feel are crucial to target and rectify to improve the problems faced by users.

Our pain points arose from doing verbal interviews with a few NUS schoolmates to get a rough sense of what features of the application (if they you use the application at all) that they are having gripes with. One of the main issues is that the mobile application does not have a similar interface as the web version. After the presentation this week, our group plans to conduct proper surveys with a greater number of NUS students on the usage of the LumiNUS web version, in order to get more accurate user data on what features they instinctively use as well as what they enjoyed the most about using the LumiNUS web version. Next, we will redesign certain layouts in the mobile application in our low-fidelity prototyping based from the user data results and our target user’s profile.

As someone that values aesthetics as a priority, I struggled during the prototyping phase as it was mainly wireframing and quick low-fidelity prototyping. Coupled with the focus on usability and redesigning workflows to address these pain points of the application, visuals and user experience concerns had to take a step back. Working in a group meant everyone had different aesthetic opinions which were often clashing and we did not have the luxury of time to go through these aesthetics as well. Nevertheless, the focus on usability is still the objective and perhaps it would be better to place heavier consideration on aesthetics in future projects.

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Assignment 2: Post 2

Our group has chosen the LumiNUS platform to work on. After the presentation of our topic and through the questions that came from the tutor and our classmates after, we realised that the focus of our topic was vague. We claimed that LumiNUS played a central role in NUS student’s lives and by that justification, that would be the application we would focus over the alternatives. However, the vagueness laid in whether it was the web or mobile or both platforms as the topic in question, as LumiNUS’s web version was a central role but the mobile version was not. 

We later came to clearly define how LumiNUS is important to students as a platform in its entirety, but its mobile version was very much overlooked by the students due to the multitude of problems users will face. As such, LumiNUS’s mobile application and its usability will be what we will focus on for this project.

We have also came up with methodology on how to find out the pain points of the application and have also came up with a brief outline on these pain points this week, which was 1 week ahead of the agenda. However, we learnt that it might not have been the best to do so as it might have resulted in us not accurately finding out what are the more relevant and therefore crucial pain points to focus on for this mobile application.

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Assignment 2: Post 1

Our group has brainstormed a few applications that will fit in the criteria that this assignment requires. The applications are Healthy365, Spotify and LumiNUS.

Healthy365 is a health and diet tracking mobile application brought about by Singapore government’s Health Promotion Board. It tracks the users fitness patterns and provides overviews and data to help the user to transit into a healthier lifestyle. We chose this application initially as the interface was ridden with unintuitive and inefficient layouts and controls, which dampens the user experience and discourages extensive and regular usage of the application.

Another application that we considered is Spotify, which is a global media service provider from Sweden. Its music streaming service serves as a platform for artists to share their craft and for listeners to listen to them, but we will be focusing on the latter’s user experience in the mobile and web application. Even though it is tailored well, both versions of applications lack good classification and parsing of music tracks that hampers the user experience, such as limited ways to find the music track amidst a sea of playlists. 

Lastly, we also considered the LumiNUS, which is the local education resource platform for the National University of Singapore. LumiNUS has web and mobile interfaces for students’ use, but most students do not opt for the mobile application due to its clunky user interface as well as unintuitive process flow. Moreover, inconsistency is rampant as design and flow of the elements on the web version do not correspond accordingly to that of the mobile application. It is also not aesthetic pleasing as well as having problems with interface scaling for the web version when opening with a mobile web browser.

Utimately, our group has chosen the LumiNUS mobile application as the application to work on due to the multitude of pain points to work on and their potential. We will be working on further analyzing its stakeholders, pain points and a potential redesigned solution for its application interface.