Picking up where I left off…
I just completed my first week of UXDI (User Experience Design Immersive) at General Assembly and I feel exactly as I’d hoped that I would — as though I am pursuing a modern day masters program of sorts.
For context, here’s a little bit about what got me here.
I graduated with a BFA in Graphic & Interactive Communication with a concentration in interactive graphic design and went on to have a super fulfilling career. By 2010 I was Art Director at Cartoon Network Digital. Turner was great in those days — they’d spring for yearly training, usually in the form of industry specific conferences and I’d chosen to attend UX Intensive (a four-day workshop examining design strategy, design research, interaction design and information architecture). I came back with all this great knowledge and enthusiasm. I conducted a “Lunch & Learn” for my department. Everyone was excited. And then nothing changed. Those were the days when a cool idea was enough to excite the powers that be to pursue a product feature or even an entire website without having data or sound reasoning to justify its worthiness — the antithesis of UX. But the genie was out of the bottle. I was a changed designer.
In 2011 I quit my Cartoon Network job to pursue a dream of mine that I’d dreamt one day in college: to become a freelancer if I ever became a mom. Check. In a few months my son will be in Kindergarten so it’s time to continue my UX training.
Back to my first week of UXDI…
My first project was to create an app for a user that would solve an existing problem of theirs. We were paired randomly with a classmate and would spend the week going through the UX project lifecycle with them for each others projects.
First off, the method is like none I’d experienced in past formal schooling which is why I call it a modern day masters program.
You learn something, apply it, learn more, refine yesterdays work, learn some more, edit some more, and so on. By Tuesday it was obvious that Monday’s work needed refining. On Tuesday we visited a local mall to apply user interviewing techniques we’d learned in class that morning for an in-class project (not the most fun part of UX when you are a classic introvert but undeniably valuable). So, of course, my brain started to relate this mall interviewing to the interviewing I’d done with my user on Monday. I interviewed my user, Glenn, but I knew I’d only just hit the tip of the iceberg and my brainstorming was suffering because of it. So on Wednesday I came in with a slew of questions and some possible solutions that I knew were rough but would bring me great insight once I approached Glenn with them. Sure enough with Glenn’s input I was able to hone in on a better solution to an existing problem.
The User: Glen, a free-spirited, risk-taker.
The Problem: His risk-taking tendencies can sometimes lead to getting caught up in the moment and perhaps lead to occasional impulsive behavior as I learned that he can sometimes be a little “road-ragey”.
Solution #1: A risk-assessment app that would help him make better decisions, like a pros and cons type of tool. But the more I got to know Glenn, it was obvious that I wasn’t approaching the solution in away that would match his personality.
Solution #2: After more brainstorming, I came upon the idea of the good & bad shoulder angels that were always employed in 80s sitcoms.
Good Angel acts like the little voice in your head, chiming in when your horns are about to poke out. Good Angel will offer you wise suggestions, scientific tidbits and inspirational quotes to help influence your overall decision-making and outlook based on your personal demons at key moments.
I wanted the app to be light so I related Glenn’s impulsiveness to his ‘bad angel’. We all got ’em so why not an app that anticipates your needs as your ‘good angel’. It would be light in tone and not too naggy or it wouldn’t work for my (or any) user.
Really, it all flowed from here. It had a lot of visual appeal for me, I was able to brand it quickly in my head which helped me come up with the right tone, language, and a preliminary logo for it which helped the graphic designer in me focus the idea.
I kept Glenn in mind when coming up with the language imagining how he’d receive it. I wanted a friendly inner voice that wouldn’t immediately make him want to dismiss the app.
EXAMPLE SCENARIO: If the app senses Glenn is texting while driving, it would pop up and with an ‘angelic’ voice that could gently say: “Hey Glenn, maybe that text can wait?”
I’m happy with the project and I learned quite a bit. I imagine most people out there learn best by doing but I’ve always known this about myself so I especially appreciate this methodology that General Assembly uses. I am already finding it to be very effective. I love that in the first week you are exposed to and expected to perform the whole UX process because even though you might be bumbling around at first you know you that you are going to do it over and over again and can feel quite confident that you can become very proficient at this especially if you put extra effort in working on the parts that give you the most trouble. For me that will be user flows and user research. Who knows, maybe by the end of my UXDI journey, I won’t hate going up to strangers so much to ask them questions!