Week 1: Part 1 — Understanding Human-Centred Design and starting our first brief
A documentation of my time spent on the 8-week User Experience course in London
I’ve enrolled in a User Experience course. This course is 8 sessions over the next 8 week’s, hosted in London.
Before starting this course I was hesitant about signing up for the beginner course. The hesitation was due to thinking I had beginner knowledge already as I’ve spent the last 3 years as a product designer but also because I didn’t want to make the mistake of paying out nearly a thousand pounds to be taught something I already knew. That said after my first session on Tuesday my previous worries about knowing too much or this course not being beneficial have disappeared.
First classroom session
Prior to our first session, we were asked to do some pre-reading as well as a mini task. This mini task was to look at a product of our choice and to run a usability and user experience analysis on the chosen product.
This task was really useful as it forced me to look at the product in two ways — the literal function of the product and the experience a person had with the product. The task was used as an ice breaker following our introductions about who we were, what we do and what we are looking to gain from the course.
What is user experience design
Before getting stuck into the nitty-gritty work we spent some time understanding what human-centred Design was.
As I already had worked with users and requirements I had a fair understanding of what was being taught to us. That said the following quote really struck a chord with me;
Human centred design does not mean designed by the user
I’m sure I’ve heard this quote before, but it seemed that it had finally clicked into what it really means when I am doing my work. A lot of the time my requirements or feedback come from an individual — a user — but this approach to focus solely on one person’s demands are incorrect as they do not speak for everyone. They speak for themselves and their context.
Preparing for the next 7 week’s
After a break, we were put into predefined groups. These groups were created to ensure a mixture of backgrounds, skills and talents.
I’m going to make a generalisation and say no one likes working in groups, and from awful experiences, at university, I can say that group work gives me anxiety. As I’ve mentioned many times before I’m a bit of a perfectionist, therefore, I really struggle to trust people I don’t know in this kind of context. That said I’m going to try and relax a bit and not allow myself to do everything just because I worry others might not do their part of the bargain.
Picking a brief
Our group chatted for some time to break the ice further and get a better understanding of each other’s skills. We then had to pick one of two briefs which we will be working on for the next 7 week’s.
The first brief was to explore banking solutions for young adults and the second brief was to design a solution that would improve the health and wellbeing of those in a building.
My initial reaction was to go for the first brief as I’m familiar with working with a bank and financial products. However, as I’m doing this course as extracurricular to my day job I thought it would be best to try to push myself out of my comfort zone and into new territory. Luckily enough the rest of my team always was keen to work on the second brief so this was our starting point.
Begining the work
As the first session drew to a close we were given the work we had to complete over the next week before the next classroom session;
- Define users
- Conduct user research
- Analyse the results
This may sound relatively easy in a week period, but these areas break down into more detailed tasks, therefore what I really had to do in a week was;
- Conduct secondary research: Understanding the subject and to become familiar with the terms wellbeing, buildings, environments and to look at the effects of both.
- Create a hypothesis which would guide our research.
- Spend time doing primary research — Our tutor was very keen on us doing this rather than secondary. Were requested to interview a minimum of 5 users but ideally 10 per team.
- Create empathy maps per user interview, then merge our findings into one team empathy map.
- Look at putting the data we had collected through our empathy maps into user personas’.
As a group, we decided that we would do a little bit of everything each and share as we went along, this way we wouldn’t have to rely on one person doing all the interviews or doing all of the reading. We also decided that we would like to conduct a survey from the questions we plan to ask our users who we will interview face to face.
Plans make progress
As I get overwhelmed very easily I like to plan as much as I can, this allows to get all the thought swirling around my head onto paper and into actionable tasks.
At best I felt that this plan was optimistic, as I work fulltime and this week I conveniently got sick so it seemed that I wasn’t off to the best start.
Before getting stuck into my reading and research I wanted to make sure I went through the brief again as I feel that understanding the brief is really important. By understanding what is being asked of you in the brief means you can understand why the brief is being set, hopefully giving you some kind of metric which you can use as your north star during the project. As this is a fictional brief we don’t have a client to go back to and ask further questions so we had to make a level of assumption ourselves or set the restrictions and requirements ourselves.
I decided to rewrite the brief in a way that felt concise and slightly less vague than the one we were given;
The reformatted brief
We spend 90% of our lives in buildings and these environments significantly impact our health and wellbeing, and ultimately our productivity and performance.
Aim: To help design and deliver a solution that will help residents of a building to improve their health and wellbeing.
As you can see this brief isn’t particularly long or in-depth by it is straight to the point making without distracting additional information. Based on this shortened brief and a discussion in our team we felt that the users we could interact with and research first hand were those in our own offices or people who we knew that worked in offices. With the decision made we swapped phone numbers, departed ways, and were ready to jump into the research phase.
Now that I was confident in the direction it was now time to begin digging into the brief and learning more about the topic as well as the users. In my next post, I’ll be documenting my initial research and explaining what I have found out so far.
Found this article interesting? You can continue reading about what happened next here: Week 1: Part 2 — Understanding our users
