reflections on the co-creating user experience class - 26th november

The class brought together the concepts learnt in class throughout the
semester. Seeing them applied in various contexts in the projects which
were presented in class before was useful in building confidence and more
proficiency in learning how to apply the framework in different
situations.

I had seen the IDEO video before in an earlier class on design methods.
There it was mostly about how to gather user needs and requirements and
synthesize them to design products. Therefore, it was all the more
interesting to look at it now from a experience centric perspective. It's
interesting to note here that most technology companies (amongst others
I'm sure) now have some sorts of groups focussing on user experience. More
often than not user experience is thought to automatically follow if you
design a good product. The IDEO video, and it's discussion in the light of
looking at it by 'putting on the co-creator's hat' brings this point
nicely into perspective. While a good product design does include the
user's experience there is a difference in the way you look at the
problem. Designing for user experience looks beyond designing just the
product but designing for the other three platform actors too - processes,
places and people!

Once you look at it from the perspective of designing considering three
four factors at the *start* of the problem there may be a lot more
opportunities that crop up even if the ultimat aim is to design a better
product. The idea is that looking into these gives you a deeper insight
into the locus of interaction of the product with these factors - giving
you a firmer foundation for your design decisions. I think this was my
main takeaway from the class.

The other interesting aspect was the more analytical approach we are
beginning to take in class now, and appreciating that designing for
co-creation requires iterating between the big picture view and the
details. This is essential in ensuring that the processes, firm
capabilities and strategy is well aligned with the goals of the project

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

going mobile !

Using the push registry to launch midlets : MIDP 1.0 specified only one way to start a MIDlet: manual activation by the user. However the MIDP 2.0 specification adds two new mechanisms to launch a MIDlet: in response to an incoming connection or at a scheduled time. While the process is not really difficult as explained in the papers and articles given on the net ( http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/midp/questions/pushregistry/ ) The actual implementation of it is tricky mainly because of the practical difficulties and platform implementations. We needed to auto start a MIDlet each time the phone boots up and the most obvious choice seemed to be using the Java Push Registry Alarm method. Having read a couple of tutorials and seen the example code given it didn’t seem something too difficult to do – however, and such is the software jungle, overcoming the practical difficulties seemed to be the biggest hurdle. For example, in my case I was using Eclipse 3.0 with the java WTK
Read more

Expertise

Some of you may be aware of the interesting research done by Dr. Anders Ericsson around the theme of "Acquisition of Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice" An important finding is that it normally takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. Of course, I can imagine this would vary a lot depending on kind of practice and how it builds on your earlier skill. So I did some quick behind the napkin math: 1. Practice Required = 10,000 hours Assuming a concentrated effort to put at least 4 hours of practice into honing your expertise in your chosen field - the other being taken up by other information tasks (e.g. did you know a large part of the so called “information work” is actually searching for information? – fun fact I gathered while working on Enterprise Search ) 2. Time required to gain that expertise = 10,000/4 = 2500 days 3. Which makes it about 7 years to gain expertise in a discipline. Interesting!
Read more

3 Idiots and Chak De India

I'm a strong believer that who we are shapes a lot of our decisions. So assuming that hypothesis is true, let's try to look at two roles from two major bollywood actors: Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. The purpose to try to see how how they perceive themselves - or project themselves if you will - based on what appeals to them in a role. The two roles we'll look at are - Shahrukh as Kabir Khan in Chak De India and Aamir Khan as Ranchoddas (Rancho) in 3 idiots. Take Racho's character, A genius , who believes the right way is to chase excellence and not success (box office?) which will chase after you if you excel at what you do. The traditional system doesn't understand him and resists his ways at first but ultimately he proves his mettle. Interesting to note that Aamir's characters doesn't do badly in the courses but tops it - despite doing things against the system, and eventually is very 'successful'. If you remove the context of the movie from the a
Read more