Final Project

Brigadier

Who are we?
We are a subsidiary of DELL, who makes use of the existing DELL business model and tape it onto the production of hand phone, targeting at military personnel.

Our team comprises 4 members from different backgrounds, namely Yi Arn, Wei Wei, Weiye and myself, Nilar.

What we have done?

During the initial stage of the project, we had done user research and defined our target audience and come up with user profile and user personas. From there, we move on to do four pleasure analysis of our product on the personas - advanced user, novice user and anti-user.

After we have done much research on our target audience, we moved on to card-sorting and information organization of our product, which is a website offering the service of customizing your own hand phone.

After the card-sorting, we come up with the different fidelity prototypes and the endless process of designing, gathering feedback, redesigning, gathering feedback follows.

I will not talk much about the detailed tests and research that we have conducted for the design process, as they can be found in full details in our report.

My reflection

Looking back at the report and what we have done for the project, I realize that it has been a really long journey of designing and redesigning. As a novice designer, we all tend to be out of track during our design process. There have been a lot of time when we just want to discard our idea and come up with a totally new idea to work on because we feel that we can't figure out how to continue our current one. However, throughout the process, we also tried to stick back to our original objective for the project and moves on with our initial idea.

In the class, I have seen some groups that really discard their original idea and come up with a new product. I believe that the journey to become a good user experience designer is to be able to make correct judgements on the users' feedback. I believe that if we ask the users what will increase their positive experience towards a product, most of them will reply 'the more the better'. I have seen the group working on breakfast delivery service totally change their target audience and services after the user research. I have also seen some group starting to create a totally new version of prototype each time after they've done user testing with it.

A lot of time, I have also wanted to give a little bit more to the users. I think it's the designer's ego and pride that we need to learn to discard during the design process. After the user testing from the low fidelity prototype, we are to make a decision whether to discard the 'slider' and 'calm shell' design phones because they connote 'weak' design phone for military. However, I had argued that since we already have the design for them, why don't we just leave the offer there for the non-military audience. This reminds me of the spicy chili crap example given in class. In the end, our team decided to offer products specifically for our target audience only. This is what the 80-20 rule is about.

Another lesson that I learnt from the project is how much changes we should do to our prototype after each user testing. If the design process is an endless cycle and the product should improve a bit after each cycle of designing and redesigning, how do those groups that come up with a totally new prototype, with all different looks and features, etc continue this spiral process of design? I learn to be always aware that each small change can lead to a big difference, thus before doing any changes, we have to justify them professionally.