Deliverable: Medium Post, Journey Maps, User Insights — 10/18

1. Post: UX Design and Curriculum

For this week articles, The Designer’s Guide to AI and 10 Principles For Design In The Age Of AI, both talk about what designers should know about user experience and artificial intelligence in design. While reading two articles for this week, I was questioning: how and why is graphic design related to user experience? Is user experience about graphic design? Even further, is design or UX design related to art? And then, I doubted an education area of graphic design.

According to the article, The Designer’s Guide to AI by Patrick van Hoof, he states “though many designers are detail-oriented and creative, they’re not usually trained in emotional awareness, statistics, or conversational messaging. They’ll need to learn these skills from other fields in order to keep up with both business and user demands.” Regarding user experience design, it seems that it is a mission for designers to know and learn about math, psychology, sociology, and biology to better understand users and create the best result. However, does graphic design curriculum in college provide appropriate courses to a career in UX? I am personally confused with what I have learned and what it is for. For instance, in some undergraduate colleges, Graphic Design major in BFA requires prerequisite courses such as Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture to receive the degree. Even though they help understand 2D and 3D visual elements, are they really necessary for pre-designers? Really? The most fundamental principle in UX is to emphasize and understand users based on research and analysis on their specific patterns, not a drawing skill.

Another article, A college-level curriculum for UX by a Design Manager in UX at Google, says “the path to a career in UX isn’t clear. Many of today’s design college graduates aren’t equipped with the right combination of tools, processes, and experiences to successfully transition into user experience jobs in digital product design.” In the article, he also conveys the core tools and methods for academic curriculum such as:

• Generative, formative, and evaluative research methodologies to understand and define problems.

• Design fundamentals such as typography, color, grid, composition, and various contextual considerations to explore and craft solutions.

• Problem-solving and logic to prototype, test, shape and evolve products.

As I mentioned at the first of class, it is worth learning something that I do not know. Still, I am learning about UX design, but I feel like I am learning the science of statistics without using any graphic elements.

2. As-Is map

3. To-Be map

4. User Insight

I am currently conducting a survey as the primary research, and it is still going on. So, I can’t say completed user insight, but here are some insights that I have found so far.

• Their diabetes are caused by:
  1. overweight
  2. eating problem
  3. lack of exercise
• Half of participants think “healthy diet” is the most important treatment for diabetes, and half of them picked “monitoring blood sugar levels, rather than physical activity and medications.
• I found that half of them “often” go out to eat.
• Most of them try to serve all meals a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner)
• On a descriptive question, they tend to be dependent on “checking blood sugar” — they would probably feel worried or concerned if not monitoring their blood sugar level.
• In terms of dietary management, they tend to avoid general sugar-food & drink — they wouldn’t probably know that just cutting back sugar is not the best way of treatment.
• Most of them reply on doctor’s advice and obtain nutrition knowledge from online — there is still a possibility that AI could assist them by collecting huge data and medical cases, and provide the best solution.

Also, I am trying to contact diabetic patients to conduct interview, but no results are found yet. Will keep trying.