Introduction to User Experience Design

Coursera Introduction Course

Course Intro

I signed up for a course from Coursera called Introduction to User Experience Design . I am fairly new to this field. I watched a few UX videos from Treehouse , so I understand the infamous door example but that's about as far as it goes. I'm curious to see what I will learn from this course. The instructor is Dr. Rosa I. Arriaga and it is offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Features of Good Design

One of the video topics was about good design features and mentioned a book written by Don Norman called "The Design of Everyday Things" about poorly designed objects. A "Norman Door" is the example I grew to become familiar with, which refers to the design being confusing or difficult. If you approach a door, ask yourself if the design makes sense. Is there a handle to grab and pull, or is there a lever to push against? An example of a Norman Door could be a door with a lever that you expect to push, but for some reason you actually need to pull the door towards yourself.

I learned a couple of key terms that seem useful - affordance and signifiers. Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of a thing and how it can be used, like a button. A signifier is a mark or sound that communicates what can be done with the thing in mind, like an on-screen keyboard. In my mind I had grouped these things together as one concept so it is good to break it down even further.

Bottom Line: A good design should have affordance, signifiers, and feedback.

Techniques for Discovery

Four techniques are provided to allow the researcher to understand how the user is currently accomplishing a task. Naturalistic observation, surveys, focus groups, and interviews are the techniques. The course goes into detail for each technique and lists advantages and disadvantages of each. Personally, I like the approach of mixing naturalistic observation with some sort of self-reported technique. Sometimes people lie when they report something, or they may report it in a way that they feel is true but is misleading in some way. I feel like if you pair that with naturalistic observation, then you have two perspectives on the topic from two different people. To me, the more information the better but only if it is quality information. I think the combination of these two techniques would provide the most efficient way to research something if exploring all options was not possible.

Further Thoughts

I am not going to go into absolute detail of every aspect of this course, but so far you should have an understanding of what kinds of topics this design course offers. I will say that I do appreciate how the design process seems to be more on the scientific side of things - that surprised me. Usually when I think of design, I think of a very creative process with little structure. Of course when drawing an image you follow a certain chain of events to get to the final form, but it normally isn't thought of as a scientific process. The way the course breaks down how to gather information and what to do with it afterwards was very structural. I was expecting more creativity and guidelines to follow for "good design" practices.

I consider myself more of a scientific person compared to one of the arts, so I did appreciate this approach to a field I am only just learning about. However, some things were overcomplicated. The section on prototyping went into detail on different types of "low fidelity" prototypes. This just means drawing a picture about the design and how people interact with it. It is excessive jargon to describe drawing stick figures and how they may interact with your design. It was a case of turning something simple and making it overcomplicated for little benefit.

Final Thoughts

As someone with a science background, I did appreciate the scientific approach initially. However, I found the material to be mostly review with different terms than what I had previously been familiar with. I completed the course in three days and got a final score of 92% so I am pleased with that.