Reflections nm4210: What's on my mind?

"Designing comes with a purpose." This is something that guides me all along the course. And thats also the reason for reseaches that we have done throughout the course - to solve problems and satisfy users' needs. It's a module on User Experience is it not? Yea and of course we'll need to solve problems to provide a better experience eh? Haha...

I've learnt, after this course, that a design wil not be a design without a purpose. Yet we can't cater to ALL the needs of our target audience.There are alot of things that we need to put into consideration while trying to satisfy the needs of the target audience. And first of all, of course we'll need to do some researches. The various methods taught during the course proved useful and efficient during our pharse of researching and i believed that even after graduation, these techniques will still prove useful to everyone of us.

I think that this course is planned very well in a sense that frist we'll look at bad designs that other people had created and comment on them so as to understand how users will feel and think if you were to create a bad design(Bad design assignment). This also brings us through a various examples of bad designs and why they are bad so that we can avoid making the same mistakes.

Secondly, we were to design a solution by ourselves to cater to a considerably small group of people(I do not consider NUS student groups using a lecture hall big as compared to the population of the whole of singapore or even human-kind). This pathed a bridge for us before we get down to work on our final project.

Fianlly, we will use all the knowledge that we picked up in class for our final project. Comments and interviews and researches allow us to fine tune and improve our product. I learnt from this pharse that i'll prefer to hear more negatives feedbacks rather than good ones so that i can improve my stuffs. This applies to everything, i believe, not just nm4210.

Basically I think i love the exercise on creating the persona the most. I wasn't quite sure of what we are supposed to do at first but i just do it 'cos it seems so much fun to *bling* come up with an imaginary person. In the later stages of the final design project, i realised the importance of this persona. The user of our product. The "purpose" of our product. And i definitely believe that this method will be useful even in doing designing outside nm4210.

A great course that i've been through. Good job Mr Reddy!!