U S E R C E N T E R E D D E S I G N
Together with my group, I designed a Payment system for children including a box with a hologram on which the user could set their saving goal and view his balance, a keychain that gave direct feedback and with which the user could pay and an app for their parents to check the user's expenses, location and balance. The main goal of the course was to learn how the user can be involved in all aspects of the design process. To achieve this goal, we conducted interviews, tried to put ourselves into the user's perspective and tested our final product.
I quickly suggested to choose children as our user group. I enjoy working with children and babysit once a week, but this was not the only reason for my interest in this group. Children are still incredibly impressionable and by designing something for them we could actually teach them something. Additionally, children have a massive fantasy and could think of ideas we had never even considered. During the user test this became especially clear. When we asked the question 'How would like like to pay in the future?' We got responses like: 'With drones, games and holograms.'
During the course, I discovered how much I enjoyed the user aspect of the design process. I enjoyed conducting the interviews and especially doing the user tests. This is mainly because I simply enjoyed the actual contact with the user, when I showed them our product, their main question was: 'when will we be able to buy it?' Their inexperienced and positive outlook motivated me.
Not only did we get positive feedback from the user, but also from our assessor. Furthermore, the environment in our group was also positive. I noticed that this motivated me even more and added to how much effort I put into the course. This did means that in my opinion I spent a lot more time working on the product than the others, since I did the user tests made the 3D models and templates, and made the report in inDesign, I also corrected a lot of the English in the report and the things I thought could be done better. In that aspect, I am too much of a perfectionist and would like to learn to let go of several things in the future and trust my group members with the work. They over all delivered great quality work. Despite the fact that it was a lot of work, I did not mind doing it, since I enjoyed it so much.
I had never worked with inDesign and SolidWorks before and can now make entire reports and 3D models. For me, these are very valuable new skills. Other things I have learned were how to get in contact with the user, and how to incorporate the user's feedback into our own design. Both were much more difficult than expected.
I started to learn from rejection, since I called 15 different schools of which none were interested in working with us on the projects. Eventually, I contacted my old primary school and luckily they were interested. Next time, we should start contacting different users as soon as we get the assignment. We were quite early, but apparently not early enough.
