Blog 3 Try Experience my Side

Exploring experience is a fascinating thing. How can I translate what I am feeling or thinking in any given moment to another person? Describing things can help but usually fall short of the truth of the feeling. We will never know what they feel, no matter how descriptive and understanding we are. I could accurately design a situation that I am trying to communicate with a person. Still, their perspective on the case could be vastly different from that of mine.

As designers, our creative abilities are put into action to try to solve problems for people through user feedback. By getting a better understanding of these user experiences, we can begin to design to solve these problems and difficulties these people have. We have to think differently outside of the box, these users are used to these problems and over many time they have just been accepted as part of life. We need to go one step further and to try and fix these issues. Tony Fadell spoke about Mary Anderson, the windscreen wiper inventor during a ted talk in 2015. On a cold, snowy night in New York, she was travelling in a streetcar, all passengers were miserable when the driver had to open his window to reach out and clean his window. Usually, people think that action is just part of life always will be. Still, Mary thought outside the box and started sketching what we know today as the windscreen wiper (Youtube, 2020).

It is up to us as designers to create guidelines for the user to follow so they can successfully use the product/ system with as little problems as possible. The users might differ from our guidance and may get lost or run into frustrating issues, this is why the interaction between user and creator is critical. Although we can't honestly think and feel our users emotions and interactions, we can try and create paths that make it simple and easy for them. Through user testing, we can identify these difficulties and try to resolve them. Still, it's not always easy to get the full true meaning. People react differently when they are told to do a task with a camera on them. Do we really think someone would lose the plot at a product set up for a user research project? Probably not hence filming users in their natural environment usually get us more accurate real results, although much harder to set up. It is tough to get the user unaware that their actions are being documented as part of the research. We can try our hardest to make it seem as natural as possible, but we still cannot ensure our observations are all that of real. It's fascinating to observe the work of a designer as they try to communicate these products to users, and on the other side trying to understand what it is these designers are trying to communicate to us. We will never know either side's true feeling we can only observe and wonder.

References:

2020. [online] Available at:: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uOMectkCCs&t=691s> [Accessed 5 May 2020].