Week 3 -- Let's Go!

Hi, everyone. 

A little late, but I’m backkkkk.

This week was probably one of the most rewarding weeks thus far. I had the opportunity to finally jump back into a subject that I’ve longed to explore since my high school departure —psychology!

As I didactically explored the elements of psychology, culture, and emotions, I did so from a place of empathetic understanding of the user’s experience. During these lessons, I wanted to ensure that I fully grasped what it means to be a user, and how these ideas ultimately affect the experience or lack thereof, a user has with a particular product/service.

Psychology: 

Unsurprisingly, psychology plays a large role when attempting to understand the user(s)’ goals, desires, and/or behavioral patterns. Since psychology focuses on studying and understanding the human mind (especially those affecting behavior in a given context), I believe that psychology is the same for everyone (more or less) since we all function by virtue of the same machine — the brain.  Understanding psychology allows UX designers to answer things like why people share, or what leads to competition amongst users within a product/service. 

Culture: 

In contrast, a user’s culture, in a sense, can honestly be anything. Derived from achievements, topics of interest, customs, and particular practices, a user’s way of life will ultimately change and/or expand overtime “as users want to personalize or categorize things more and more” (Marsh). 

According to Joel Marsh, an experience encapsulates the following six parts: 

1. what the user feels, 
1. what the user wants,
1. what the user thinks,
1. what the user believes, 
1. what the user remembers, and
1. what the user does not realize.

These user-centric ideas usher in the discipline of psychology and the understanding of culture calling for designers to cater to particular areas of user interest and/or concern in an effort to provide the best user experience. 

Project Update: 

As I completed Milestone 2, I had the opportunity to examine competitors and perform a SWOT analysis in efforts to discover what elements within these other platforms and services are areas of interest or concern for users. 

I also had the chance to put my Needs Finding Plan into action as I interviewed Baylor students. Within these interviews, I applied affinity diagrams as my means to organize many ideas into groups with common themes or relationships. Each interviewee had the opportunity to formulate categories based on a list of various, potential features and requirements derived from my SWOT analysis. This allowed me to discover the relationship between those features from the users’ perspectives, and ultimately provided design direction to be established based on the associations presented from the users. 

In addition, I began constructing personas that catered to the audience of this particular project, and also drafted a few sketches and concepts that I anticipate will be consolidated into concept storyboards within the next milestone. 

Master Dashboard Sketch (1 of 5)

Project User Persona (1 of 3)