Wow… What a session, it certainly took pretty long for this first lecture to conclude, as there’s really too many peers in today’s class. As such, being the last few to present, I had to cut my presentation really quick and short, but still being concise enough to get my points across, this is probably one of the first pointers I’d learnt in this module already! Anyways, being the first session of UX in this semester, it was a fresh, interesting but shaky prelude into what was expected for this UX module. A great warm-up and overture to the subsequent assignments: the theme of Bad Design, in which you have to make your product sound really bad, and I felt that I myself, and everyone else really made the products sound bad!
Everybody presented what a design that they chose and felt that was a bad design. However, was really surprised to see some of the products being listed, or rather, the factors that causes it to be a bad design was something that we’d never thought of. Particularly, the showerhead one for the exchange student (really hilarious), mobile phone’s time indicator (which is really not the emphasis of the phone but it somewhat affected individual’s UX), the barbeque pits, as well as MacBooks batteries (which I never used before).
My bad design presentation was pretty understood by many, as not much questions was raised and you can actually see people nodding in consent, hence I guess I did a fairly effective job in bring across the critic to convey my bad design overview. More importantly, I felt that somehow, the peers ultimately appreciate the usefulness of auto mirrors, which is definitely an iterative process of refining mirrors UX in driving. I’d learnt pretty much in this session, both in presentation (convincing the audience its a bad design), as well as learning from peer’s presentation on bad designs, why they felt its bad.
My eventual reflections for this warm-up assignment are that user experience is not something that’s so profound to notice, it’s actually foresee-able, or rather instinctively noticeable. A vague illustration is the very first feel that you experience when you encounter the product. One look at it and it already tells something about your likings to it. What I also learnt is that for a more substantial instance, a good UX would entail something that people would use more often (but pleasantly). That would usually denote that they are satisfied with the UX that the product offers. Putting it in another way, plainly, it really means that users wouldn’t even bother to touch it, if they don’t like it.
Also, I realized that for designs, human nature still plays a part. You would have noticed that for good or better designs, it is really rare that they are being praised, unless they are exceptionally good or extremely visually enticing. Yet, we can almost effortlessly spot and complain ceaselessly and willfully at bad designs. This is clearly evidently aplenty in many of the presentations today, such as the aluminum seating installed at MRT platforms, MP3 players that are too small to grasp and read (the status panel). What really surprised me is that even our local government, who should have some aesthetic/design departments at their disposal, can overlook and handle poorly design issues, such as the shelters, whose initial installation were appalling, only to be rebuilt, wasting time and money, worse still, given the residents a bad initial impression, resulting in a bad UX.
However, it also goes to show that designs don’t get better at first implementation, its incremental just like what the Chinese saying goes: only through failure that success would eventually transpire. I guess product design isn’t just a day’s effort to be flawless, it requires careful and extensive refinements. Moreover, its hard to please everyone, but we should really try to please the majority (especially the shower head one, tall guys in Singapore are really rare!). Hence, there’s always the need to weigh and balance pros and cons of designs and user insights are really indispensable.
