Individual Reflection #1

During the seminar on Thursday, my group and I brainstormed on different applications to be the focus of our group project. We managed to come to a conclusion on the application that we will be working on, which is Instagram and set a meeting timing to complete our first milestone. In order to expedite our discussion, I initiated the creation of our group Google Drive and documents to allow greater organization and drafting of our ideas.

Initially, we started brainstorming by voicing out applications that we personally have frustrations with while using them. This makes it easier for us to see which application has more opportunities to be redesigned. I contributed by voicing certain pain points while using applications like TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram. For example, I found the chat function of TikTok difficult to use as it did not contain as many advanced features as usual chatting applications. Another example would be Instagram where Instagram videos are automatically converted to Reels, without giving the users a choice.

However, as we kept contributing ideas, we could not come to a decision on which application we should work on. Hence, I suggested that we should choose an application that all of us have used before in order to make it easier for everyone. I also voiced out the application that I was leaning towards, suggesting to my group that we could possibly consider this application for our project. In the end, we chose Instagram for our group project, as it contains the most amount of pain points that we personally have experienced.

Another challenge we faced was whether we should zoom into a particular feature of Instagram or work on Instagram as a general idea first. We were quite confused as to which is the better solution. Hence, I suggested asking Dennis for advice to give us a better direction of where to go towards. After asking for advice, we decided that not zooming into any particular feature of Instagram would be a better choice. This is because we do not want to close off any possible redesigning opportunities too early. Not only that, zooming into a feature of Instagram and after that conducting user research may easily lead to confirmation bias.

From all these, I learned that sometimes having too many options may not be the best. This is because if there is no sense of direction, things will seem more complicated and it will be more difficult to make a conclusion. Hence, it is very important to understand our purpose in whatever we are doing and whichever stage we are at during our design process in order to not lose track of our intention.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Event #2: Three Important Considerations Before You Start Prototyping

Image
I attended a webinar titled Three Important Considerations Before You Start Prototyping. It is conducted by Eugene Wong and Vivien Chan from NUS ISS. The webinar mainly covered the considerations that designers should think of before prototyping. The considerations are: Which problem are you solving? → Research desired outcomes How would solving it impact the customer and the business? → Identify and map opportunities How do you convince stakeholders? → Prioritise opportunities The webinar mentioned that we should use a systematic approach to optimise experimentation and prototyping efforts. While experimenting or prototyping, we should not jump to our conclusion and make sure that we are able to map the desired outcomes to our opportunities. #1: Research Desired Outcomes The first consideration is to research desired outcomes. As designers, we should aim to learn more about the customers’ experiences rather than their opinions on something that hasn’t happened. We should also...
Read more

Individual Reflection #4

One challenge we faced was that we iterated through Design and Develop in the Double Diamond design process a few times. We constantly refined our overall pain point and narrowed it down by being more specific. I also refined the wireframes after receiving feedback from users and my group mates. This made me realize that as we clarified more assumptions and questions, it is easier to narrow down our scope and be more sure about our design solutions according to user feedback. I realized the importance of iterations and going back to stages in the design process. Reflecting on it, it is good that we iterated because we could make improvements and be closer to what the user needs or wants. I also worked on the evaluation and justification of our design which taught me a lot about translating inconveniences into clear goals. From our goals, we diverged our thinking and came up with a few ideas to attain the goals. For example, we were discussing how users would go to the Stories Overview ...
Read more

Individual Reflection #3

Image
This week, I learned that a pain point may contain multiple frustrations. My group narrowed down into one pain point focusing on the browsing of Instagram stories. Within the browsing of stories, there are frustrations like difficulties viewing seen stories and the inability to create multiple stories groups. As a designer, this allowed me to understand more about the need to dissect pain points as they may contain underlying frustrations since the pain point may not be the root cause of the user’s annoyance. For the project, I was in charge of developing the wireframes on Miro. One difficulty that I faced was that I was not sure of the best methods to put certain elements on the interface. I tried to overcome this by using my contextual knowledge and following current practices of design and Instagram. This reminded me of a case study on Apple web store that I did which emphasised on their clear visual hierarchy. With reference to the figure below, upon viewing this page, users will u...
Read more