Tutorial Week 3

Project One Brief

Go through project 1 brief: Improving university learning experience Identify your primary user group. Observe target user group to find issues that needs attention and can be addressed with help of technology. Make sure by addressing the identified issuers you are improving quality of university learning for the target user group. Develop 3 ideas that could address identified issues Make a short pitch for your ideas and bring them to the tutorial next week.

Primary User Group

Primary user group are 1st year students, be they school leavers or mature age students.

Issues

A disassociation from the learning environment and the social aspects surrounding that. Lack of friends or someone to talk to, a lack of support. Study skills are not refined, self-driven learning was not part of their education. On campus the interaction that users have with technology is either a smartphone, laptop, tablet or library computers. Not everyone has a laptop, tablet or is able to access a library computer therefore a phone app would be the best

Ideas 

• A chat application that links UC students with other UC students – so they can discuss assignments, workloads and how they are coping. Providing each other support like a buddy system. Users can choose to talk to someone in the same unit, course, year or just ALL. This would also have lecturers and other support staff online providing a less formal and more casual approach to student interaction. Instant messenger. 
• An application that acts as a timetable / calendar, recommending how much time should be allocated towards assignments and alerting the user when assignments are due. Integrated with Moodle so that it automatically DLs results and alerts the user when a forum is active or there is an announcement. Also indicates where a student is sitting in terms of class rank. 
• Creating more shade and more gardened areas, a pub or place of relaxation with a large beer garden. Lots of power ports, phone chargers and cheap food. More on campus student activities to engage students and make them feel a part of the community. 

Reflection

During this class I had many ideas for a product that I felt would be amazing to deliver to students, however many of them did not fit the criteria of the brief. This was pointed out to me by Raghu and forced me to look back over the brief and compare my ideas to what the issues really were. I felt like I had some good concepts, I just needed to tease them out of the list of ideas I had. Looking back over the brief then re-listening to the lecture materials allowed me to refine my ideas and generate a better understanding of my clients wishes. The ability to rationalise or simplify ideas will be vital in my work as a graphic designer, to be able to step back and maintain an objective opinion will be a great asset in the future and something I should practice more often.

Tutorial Week 2

User Interface vs. User Experience

    

What is a good or a bad interface design? Choose one good and one bad interface design and prepare a rational for why you think one is good and one is bad.

Important to keep in mind: Pick both good and bad examples from the same category and platform to make it easy for comparative analysis: For example, shopping list app for android mobile: Pick one shopping list app which you thinks is good and one that you think is bad. And, explain why.

Good Interface Design

  

Australian National University Website
While not at all innovative the ANU website is a sturdy reminder that not all websites need to break away from the norm or what is expected in order to achieve good UI Design. The ANU website is clean, easy to navigate and both the visual and textual heirachy is balanced - creating an overall pleasing aesthetic.
  

Bad Interface Design

        

University of Canberra Website
The UC website is opposite - it has tried to break away from these normal conventions and in doing so created a UI that is harder to navigate by nesting pages in areas that is difficult to find. The menus are overwhelming and the non-static images are distracting to the user. There are multiple elements trying to grab attention creating disharmony and a lack of balance to the page. The visual hierarchy needs attention.
  

Reflection

  

This tutorial had us looking at various interface designs, trying to decipher the bad from the good. My position during the exercise was to think like a designer not a user - this ability will allow me to fully understand and interpret good design from bad design. This is something I found difficult to do separating my experiences, preferences and emotion from the equation. In theory I understood the differences but in practice it was much harder to determine.

This difficulty forced me to reflect on the argument of UI vs. UX. They can't really be separated, one leads to the other and when designing they similarly cannot be separated. While it is entirely possible to pick out UI flaws these are therefore also flaws with UX. The experience and interface design should always be at the forefront of design strategy working cohesively to create a product that is well balanced and well received. This understanding of UI and UX design will be of great benefit to me moving forward with Graphic Design as it will allow me to design and better product.