Summarizing My Design Experience

Doing the online journals really stretched my creativity. After conducting much observation, I have realized it truly takes a long and drawn out process to make sure a product is user-friendly. I have also had the opportunity to study designs that are not as user-friendly. Studying these designs and creating ways to improve them has been very beneficial to me. For example, the Wilson Fish website that I redesigned with the wireframe taught me a lot about layout. The first wireframe I created and brought to class had a lot of problems with it, but after receiving class feedback as well as feedback from Carolina, I feel like I have created a very strong wireframe that I would feel comfortable sending in to Wilson Fish as a recommendation. The benefit from this experience is if my company in the future needed to redesign there website, I feel I would be able to contribute valuable information on the subject matter.

The task flow chart for MediaSpace was also very helpful to learn. MediaSpace has been struggling with a lot of design problems. It is hard to navigate through the site, leaving many people, including myself, often confused and frustrated. In Hoekman’s book, “Designing the Obvious,” in chapter two, he talks about how “an effective task design is one that makes it obvious how to get from one step to the next in a process…” (Hoekman, 43). I felt like I really improved MediaSpace’s task flow with the employment opportunities because it was given more of a clear direction, helping get through the variety of steps as Hoekman recommends in his book.   

What surprised me most about the content presented in class was how we learned to make things easy for people to use, but if items become to easy to use, they will not be welcomed by the users. I know this because when Betty Crocker introduced cake mix where all you do is ad water, “The cake mix was a little to simple. The consumer felt no sense of accomplishment, no involvement with the product,” making the consumer feel useless, (Norman, 55). This is why today we add an egg, oil, and water, to make it feel like we accomplished more. In a way, it is important not to talk down to the consumer and make them feel stupid, but at the same time you cannot talk up to them because they will feel patronized. I learned it is important to level with them and really enjoyed our class discussion on this topic.

The class presentation that excited me most was John Davis. I was really intrigued by his guest lecture because of how he gave us details on how a major company designs a product. Some of the things he mentioned, about how the box size is incredibly important when it comes down to shipping and saving money, as well as the controversy over the simple feature like a handle. The important thing I learned from him is every step needs to be carefully analyzed. Even the smallest design features that are not planned carefully can result in a multi-million dollar loss for the company.

The most valuable learning part for me was working with real-world professionals and gaining hands on experience on designing products. I will use this in any job I have, because I believe that all jobs involve designing things, especially in today’s ever growing digital age.