Week5. Final Reflection
Five weeks ago, I started a new project with three classmates to improve the experience of LGBTQ+ patients at NYU Langone Health. Prior to the project, I knew little about my teammates and it’s exciting for me to collaborate with them since it’s an in-person collaboration. I joined the program during the pandemic, and every group project was conducted remotely. And after some negative experience, I felt reluctant to start another project fully remotely. I understand that lack of communication and time differences could prevent teammates from building trust and generating creative ideas together.
At the beginning of the project, I expected to be able to facilitate workshops for our groups and also engage everyone in open communication. It turned out that all of my teammates are actively participating and self-motivating in this project. We are open to other people’s opinions and feedback, and we are eager to learn from each other. after several weeks. When it comes to technical skills, we have different skill sets and it’s great to have everyone taking on different parts during the execution phase.
This problem we are solving could have been interpreted differently for each team member, and I believe we all tried to understand it with our prior experiences and knowledge. The LGBTQ+ experience is a very American topic, and as someone who comes from a homogeneous country, I believe this issue is real, but it has never been brought up in many other countries and cultures.
To cater to the unique needs of our target audience, we tried thinking very differently, such as “What if I were a Transman, what color would be appropriate for me?”. It can be challenging to create an experience for the gender expansive community, as their experiences and feelings are often ignored. However, as designers, we have a responsibility to defend our users and make sure that they receive the best experience possible.
Things we could have done differently
- User research.
During my first year I took a User Research class and learned several methods of planning and conducting a research session, such as user interviews; user survey; user observation; and think-aloud protocol. I have not had much experience applying to all of them, and to have the fund and resources conducting user research is also a luxury. While I am not interested in becoming a UX researcher, I believe it is beneficial for every designer to understand how and when to choose the right method and conduct independent research. Previously I have mainly applied quantitative research methods and have little experience with qualitative research, but interacting with users has always provided me with valuable insights. In this project, however, we missed out on several key opportunities to conduct user research, such as doing more interviews with healthcare professionals, and conducting qualitative research when we first came up with ideas. It could be helpful to have them answering our concerns and prove our assumptions.
2. Market research
In the final presentation, some other groups presented their findings through competitive analysis and market research, and how they reinvented the existing products to solve the problem better. In our group, we jumped right into ideation without learning from the existing platforms and services. Additionally, since this is an academic project, we didn’t think about the business outcomes and implementation, we merely considered the problem and the users, not the wider environment. What if the project is meant to solve a business problem? What if our goal is to reach a certain metric? What if we are told they’re limited funding to implement the final prototype? We don’t seem to be addressing these questions with our process and solution. To improve something already exists is perhaps a more conservative approach than coming up with a brand new product, but I believe the latter would require more solid user research and technical considerations.
3. Presentation
We successfully made our presentation this week, however, there is some critical feedback on our narratives. To present your work, you want to demonstrate how you approach the issue from the very start to the very end. But we skipped a lot of background information and the context of the problem in the beginning, making people feel confused. Making the decision to start with a persona and not introduce the larger problem seems a poor decision. Further, I found out that not everyone in the group is aware of how each step of the process connects to another, which makes it difficult to explain the whole process and why we did that. Presentation skills can be improved with practice, but I wanted to remind myself to not ignore the importance of presenting work.
Final Thoughts
Finally, I wanted to thank all the people that have helped me and our group this semester. It’s been a challenging class working though many things that I never thought about. I believe there’s no absolute end for any design project, and I do not wish to stop iterating this project right after the class ends. In my opinion, you should only take action when it’s important, but you have to spend lots of time to decide what’s really important.
