Aerin's NM4259 Blog

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 ...

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...

During Week 4, my group became more certain of our choice of mobile asset - Instagram. I initially had doubts because I was unsure if there was enough opportunities to redesign it well as a designer due to Instagram being a large, established and popular platform. I voiced out this concern to my group during class. After class and after reflecting on that, I realised that we should not think of redesigning as simply the changes on the interface, but it also encompasses the underlying interactions, interaction flows or stuff like reducing the number of steps to do certain actions. This reminded me of a small change that Instagram made last time by changing the middle bottom navigation bar button from posting a Instagram post to scrolling Instagram reels. This brought about great dissatisfaction among many users. Hence, it made me realise that a small change can bring about huge impact as it disrupted the normal user flow and habits. This learning point could be brought into our project ...