“In the ideal process, you'd first conduct competitive testing to get deep insights into user needs and behaviors with the class of functionality you're designing. Next, you'd proceed to parallel design to explore a wide range of solutions to this design problem. Finally, you'd go through many rounds of iterative design to polish your chosen solution to a high level of user experience quality."
-----Jakob Nielsen
I could not tell myself that how systematical and how well Nielsen summarized the design process for us as a golden guiding rule. Back to our group project—Feed Me Well, I could not count how many times our group revised the project, although it is just a class assignment without any marketing purposes. From brainstorming to the initial prototype, we did tons of research on why it is meaningful to the end users, how much possible it is to execute and implement the design, what kind of interfaces would meet the end users’ expectation, etc. In each phase, nearly every week, we group members usually sat together and spent at least half an hour to polish every version of the draft. Moreover, after three times of peer reviews and user testing, we refined the design ideas based on their feedbacks. I think this typical iterative design results in a positive effect and an approval from the peers, at least until now. “More iterations are better.” In the following production and evaluation phases, our group will follow the rules and keep applying them to our design, from which I am sure you could see big improvements.
“At each step, you should be sure to judge the designs based on empirical observations of real user behavior instead of your own preferences. (Repeat after me: "I am not the Audience.")
---Jakob Nielsen
Coincidently, yesterday, one of my friends talked to me about a project that she is currently responsible for. She, a curriculum developer, got a big lesson from her director. Her director, who leads the project’s development direction, did not start it based on the customers’ needs but just based on her own assumptions instead. Until in a conference meeting with the customers, they got many feedbacks from their customers, they suddenly found out that the project they designed did not meet their customers’ needs, and the customers actually did not need the project which the whole project group has been struggling for in the past half a year. In other words, the project has never been on the right track since the very beginning due to the director’s assumption. “As a designer, we could not underestimate or overestimate customers based on our own assumption.” Concluded she, and deeply sighed. The lesson my friend got from her director once again emphasized the importance of the user-based design, which is similar to Nielsen’s reminder that “I am not the audience”, and could not replace the audience to decide how it will be designed just depending on our own assumption. As such, thanks to the user-based design course, I have an opportunity to deepen my understanding on it and to do more practices.
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