This post includes revelations and large take-aways on design from my course on Human Computer Interaction. While I am not a design expert, I have learned a lot about the design process through the experience of designing a residential event application (RES) throughout the course. All design should incorporate elements of the user-centered design process to ensure that the creation is the best that it could be. Good design is not speculative, subjective, nor harmful. Designers should therefore incorporate potential users as well as consider the ways others can be affected by design implementation to truly create a good design.
The following are five ways you can create good design:
- Prevent unethical impact of a design by considering potential side-effects
- Consider accessibility to help make a design easier for ALL users
- Different types of design testing is necessary to help properly identify problems
- Affinity diagraming and other informal methods of analyzing user research is necessary to help brainstorm different design ideas
- Make iterative revisions as much as effectively possible
1. Ethics
Think about the side effects of your design
It is easy to only focus on the users when creating something through user-centered design. However, this course has shown me ways in which design can potentially impact others in negative ways, due to the fact that designers do not often consider design impact on those other than the ideal user. This is why it is important for the inclusion of this type of thinking within the design process. If the way ALL people are impacted is not considered, then there are bound to be ethical implications with design implementation through side-effects. For example, we can think about the way Facebook’s mission to connect people through their platform could in fact also hurt them through the publicization of private information. A Wall Street Journal article speaks about this when a young adult’s sexuality was outed when added to a Queer Chorus Facebook group and all her Facebook friends were notified without her consent. This is clearly something the creators of Facebook groups did not consider when thinking of the benefits of the feature to their platform, but maybe if they considered the side-effects of their design throughout their design process, then others would not have gotten hurt by its implementation.
When creating RES, we thought about the way creating access to more social events on a college campus could also impact safety and therefore inconvenience those whose jobs include ensuring the safety of all students on campus. Because of this, we thought about ways to notify facilities and housing authorities through the application to not only keep them in the loop but also make communication between them and students better to ensure that their roles involving safety are not negatively impacted by RES. Speaking to different types of people during our research via contextual inquiry helped us be more conscious of those other than students when thinking about solving the problem of the lack of a social space within residential environments.
2. Accessibility
Considering accessibility helps make a design easier to use for ALL users
It is important for all designers to at least consider one way in which they can make their design accessible to users that may have a disability. When designing RES, we paused to think about accessibility after creating a paper prototype for our design idea. This was the perfect time to do this because we already had an idea of what our design would look like, and making changes to the design would not be costly due to the fact that we had only done a low-fidelity prototype. One of the main ways that we focused on accessibility through RES was with the presence of images and concise but descriptive language. Our application is an interactive map with emojis that represent events. In addition to this, we have images that represent different functionalities on the menu bar paired with descriptive headings. We thought that this would do a good job when helping to prevent clutter and also when helping with user understanding, especially for users on the autistic spectrum, users that need screen readers, and also users with dyslexia according to the UK government’s Dos and Don’ts of designing for accessibility. The lack of text on the application interface paired with a menu bar that has concise and descriptive language regarding button functions not only help the types of users mentioned by the source above, but also helps with clarity and simplicity for all users. Clearly designing for accessibility allows designers to even further benefit the user experiences for everyone.
3.Design testing
Helps designers properly identify design problems
The purpose of design testing is to identify problems within a design. When creating RES, we conducted three different types of design testing and each allowed us to identify different types of problems. We conducted user testing, cognitive testing, and heuristic evaluations. It is important for all designers to conduct at least two different types of testing to help them identify different types of problems that their users might come across, and further improve their design. Conducting user testing of a prototype or product allows for problems regarding basic functionality to stand out. Even with this, if there are multiple types of users participating in the testing and using the design, you may be introduced to many different problems. With RES we focused on testing our design with students, but we also tried to use a couple of students who would be bound to create and attend events often due to participation in extracurriculars on campus.
While our usability testing allowed us to identify problems with different aspects of functionality, we also conducted cognitive walk throughs with our paper prototype. Cognitive walk throughs allow designers to identify problems themselves as they take the time to walk through tasks with their prototype or design. This type of testing is extremely low cost and allows the designer to identify problems with functionality just like user testing. However, finding these problems before usability testing allows for more effective usability testing where problems can truly be found that the designers themselves did not notice.
Another example of design testing is heuristic evaluation where a designer, not from the design team of the product being tested, similarly walks through desired tasks like a user would in usability testing but specifically looks for aspects of the design that violate design rules from Jakob Nielson’s usability heuristics. This allows for more high level design problems to be identified, other than basic functionality, since the heuristics are ideal characteristics of a usability interface such as design consistency, design recognition through visibility of objects and options, and user control and freedom. Clearly these are aspects of a design that a regular user would most likely not notice, so it is valuable to identify problems and gain the opinions of design experts through this type of testing.
Clearly there are many different ways to test a design, and I believe that each designer should at least test their creation in two different ways. Both cognitive walk-throughs and heuristic evaluation testing are relatively low cost and effort given the fact that the subjects of the testing are the designers themselves or their collogues. This just goes to show how easy it would be to therefore conduct this testing in addition to testing that is a bit more taxing such as usability testing. Overall, testing is necessary because identifying problems is critical for improvement through revision and therefore an iterative process of design.
4. Interpreting User Research
Affinity diagraming & other informal methods of analyzing user research helps designers brainstorm ideas
All user centered design requires some sort of user research, so designers must therefore know how to effectively interpret their results from this research. I propose that using an official method of understanding user data, such as affinity diagraming, is the most helpful in addition to other informal methods since different methods emphasize different aspects of results. This will also in turn allow for different types of ideas to be brainstormed with the same root/starting point from user research. Affinity Diagramming is one of the most popular ways user research is analyzed which is why I consider it an “official method”. Affinity diagraming is where designers sort data into groups to understand the most important take aways from it. The purpose of this method is to help designers sort and prioritize ideas and user problems. If grouping data and connecting it through common themes is not a method that sounds the most useful for designers, there are many others ways to analyze qualitative data that designers can do in addition to affinity diagramming. Examples of other methods of interpreting results include team discussion of findings, organization of data within a specific format, or using data to solidify who they are designing for through personas and scenarios. It is important to choose the right method for your design team, but it also does not hurt to perform multiple methods of analysis with the same data to see how a multitude of ideas can come from one set of user data. Through our design process with RES, we used affinity diagraming but we also discussed our data informally very extensively to help brainstorm ideas. This will further contribute to the creativity and authentic user focus of a final design. Clearly affinity diagramming and other methods of interpreting user research is key to good design.
5. Keep Revising
Iterative revisions allow designers to get as close to a perfect design as possible.
If I had to choose the most important aspect learned about user-centered design from my human computer interaction class, it would be the fact that revision is necessary for good design. The final product of RES was created through many revisions and looking back to our first design plan and prototype, there would have been a lot of important features missing. Revision is especially helpful for someone designing for the first time, because it is more likely that the first implementation proposed for a design idea would be far from perfect. Revisions are the most helpful and effective when severe problems can be properly identified because changes made to a design based on these problems will be the most impactful to the user experience. If severe problems can no longer be identified, then that is a good sign of when it is most likely okay to stop revising your design. Without revision, it is easy to for designers to overlook simple functionality features such as back buttons because the big picture of the design is more often focused on. In addition to revision contributing to the inclusion of smaller functional details within a design, the iterative process also helps designers think of different ways to implement certain features and consider which way would be the most beneficial. Iterative design definitely goes hand in hand with design testing which is why this is naturally one of the ways a designer can accomplish good design given the emphasis on design testing in the previous section. An iterative design process is a solution-oriented design process in which designers not only find a single solution through their designs but the best solution.
Conclusion
Design process is clearly the key to good design. I put an emphasis on accessibility as a way to make the user experience easier for everyone, ethical implications of design side-effects to ensure positive impact, design testing as a means to properly identify problems, methods of interpreting user research to truly design for the user, and lastly, iterative revision as a way to constantly improve design with a user focus. These five points defined my design process when creating RES throughout the course, and I believe that they would be helpful for anyone creating through user-centered design.