The Culinary Art of “UX Design”.
Disclaimer: I’m a student and I don’t actually agree with this philosophy but from my previous 6 semester’s experience as a Design student this is something I observed people doing.
There’s two you, one from Earth of Milkyway Galaxy and one from Planet KOI-456 from a parallel universe. Part-time chef on earth and fulltime Experience/Product/Interaction Designer on KOI-456, below is a summary of an incident you encountered on one fine day.
1 Ding-Dong! There’s a requirement on the door.
Cosy evening and you had a special guest come over to your place, you don’t want your special guest to die out of hunger so it was time for your inner Gordan Ramsey to rise up. You asked your guest what they’ll love to have on their plate and surprisingly they gave you a good description of what they want. A Fattoush, crispy crunchy salad from middle east.
In Parallel universe
Monday morning, you had a new project to be taken care of, this project may help you get an increment so you really want your product design to shine. Your design faculty or your project manager tells you what they love impersonating it as what business requires. A cool functional design.
To fulfil that Hunger you need a Dish, and that’s your design deliverable.
2 Should you analyse the requirements you got? Yes.
You get back to your desk and started your desk research or in simple terms, you start consuming your data while browsing google, you look at images of Fattoush, it looked complex but not something Chef in you cannot prepare. Next step was watching recorded videos of other popular chefs preparing the same. “it kinda looks slick” you murmured.
In Parallel universe
So the task was to redesign the Sign up section of our product, hmm. time to get back to your desk. hop on to websites you adore, adding a tab of Pinterest. No, you don’t like dribble, you are a product designer. Finally bookmarking a lot of designs you loved. But wait what about User research and business needs? I think you should interview your team members only, that should suffice(at least you collected data).
3 Finding the right recipe wasn’t easy.
finally, out of 100s of recipes available, you chose the easiest one, telling your guest how special this recipe actually is(duh..) and you thought you’ll look more professional. Gazing at that recipe pondering on each step to what ingredients and equipment it will take and do you have those things. If yes, I think it’s time for you to go ahead and start the preparations.
In parallel universe
Okay so to provide the design deliverable and to justify your paycheck it was highly important to follow a design process but literally, there are so many out there. So you selected one that you’re comfortable with (but is the best for the project?) and decided to go forward, looked at each step and thought how you could implement the same. Your project manager/mentor is happy too seeing you do so much hard work.
4 I wish if I had Romaine lettuce.
Finally, you search out your refrigerator along with all your kitchen Cabins, you require Romaine lettuce but sadly you got only Butterhead lettuce. Tough situation but who’s knowing about it. from all the different places from your house somehow you arranged enough ingredients listed in the recipe that you thought would get you the taste and look you wanted.
In parallel universe
It was time for you the task you find most interesting, looking at what other people have done and be in aww of same. The screens you have to design you need to finalise on a layout, placement and hierarchy, colours and more. Visiting flaticon become a hobby, even though the specific icon you wanted you didn’t get it(It was premium, sad). You were too lazy to create on your own so you opted for a similar matching one, it’s just an icon.
5 Oh my boy, that Plating looks so fancy! I probably should sell it.
At last, it was to do solid plating, plating that will hide the fact you followed the simplest recipe and you didn't get Romaine lettuce, but you know how to make your guest flabbergasted. This was the moment when the Dali in you rose up, abstract and cool the first thing your guest said was “WOW” and you know your tricked work.
In parallel universe
Processing the elements to your understanding you finally achieved the design that you suddenly now love the most. But would your mentor or manager agree to the beauty you created? you decided to create a killer presentation and starts a quest to find validation of your work add some garnishes, tweaked shadows, created radial graphs to represent feelings of your potential user (how you measured them? well, nvm) and more. Surprisingly your thorough meaningful hard work was appreciated by your mentor/manager.
But did your guest actually liked the taste of your Dish or the users actually find your redesigned screen flows helpful? Well, we’ll leave that to some other day.
:D
Aditya Bansal
Interaction Design student at Delhi Technological University
Reach out to me at aditban@gmail.com or at adityaban.com
