Experience Centred Design!

In class today we had a guest speaker Kelly Morrissey, she first gave us a task to read one of three pieces to read to understand what designing for different people was really like. The piece that I decided to look at was a prayer companion. I was very interested by this as the user was trying to create a product that didn’t look out of place in a nunnery while still being able to follow the brief that designer was given. He had to understand how the nuns were not the best at using new technology, so he decided to interrogate the news headlines to keep them in the know how of what was happening in the world around them. I learned how he had to go and experience their lifestyle to figure out what he could do with the design. This knowledge helped me carry out a task given to us by our guest speaker

Our experience centred design and how it helped!

Our task was to split into groups and make a skit of someone’s experience with tinder in our group. Our experience came from Emily Wheelan’s first-hand experience with tinder she explained to us what types of people she met and how felt during these interactions. After brainstorming with the group, we decided to act out her feelings in front of the class to showcase the strange but funny feeling that our user had. Using pens and paper we got to work and past the jokes and general antics we were doing I found that I had a good understanding about how she felt when using this app. This gave me a better understanding about getting to know the user to really understand what they were looking for in any particular product. It helped me understand that ‘living the life of a user’ is one of the most important lessons to learn. This is mainly because of a line that Kelly said to us during the class ‘As a designer you are never usually making a product for yourself’ this stuck to me as every product that I have ever thought about previously was centred around what I thought was best not what the person or types of people I was designing for.

This week helped me take a deeper consideration into why I designing any product.