Reflecting back on these first three months as a design thinker, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come. The seemingly-relentless cycle of new concepts and deliverables passes by in a flash, and we’re left with countless lessons to look back upon, gained from our successes, mistakes, regrets and great decisions. Upon considering these for myself, I am left with five main points I hope to carry forward with me as I continue my journey with design thinking. In this design manifesto, I survey these highlights, which pertain to the user perspective, rapid iteration, the importance of accessibility, personal ethics, and design confidence.
Know what the user doesn’t know
Many of the most important lessons I’ve learned from this process relate to understanding the user and how they experience using a design. We, as designers, are naturally far more familiar with what we’re making than the users are. As such, in creating our designs, it’s easy to fail to effectively communicate how to use them. Our conceptual models are far clearer. Considering this, it makes sense that a good design practice is to think about what the user is seeing in a state of a design, and how to best make whatever that is clear and understandable. Here, though, I identify something slightly different. It’s intuitive to attempt to address the clarity of what you’re presenting to a user, but it’s not always immediately obvious to think of what the user has no conception of. This issue is evident in a particular incident that came up in my group’s usability testing stage, in which we learned that thinking through the blind spots in the user experience is just as important as making our existing interface understandable. To preface, our design is one that includes two main components: a mobile web-app and large interactive displays mounted on walls throughout the different exhibits in WCMA. Comments and reactions to paintings submitted on the web-app appear on the displays.
For my teammates and I, the link between the web-app and the displays was fundamentally obvious. The same, however, was not true for our usability test participants. One participant, in the middle of a usability test in our ‘Sheep Gallery,’ asked what the large interactive display was upon reaching the following screen.
Clearly, we hadn’t realized that the users’ conceptual model of our design would not inherently include the link between these two components. In a physical space in which the user is initially exposed to only one part of our design, the web-app, the large interactive display is out of sight, out of mind. We had put thought and effort into making the above page clear and intuitive to use, but hadn’t thought of the potential missing links in the user’s understanding of the whole picture. Going forward, it’s imperative to find out exactly what these missing links might be, reinforcing the need for usability tests like the ones we conducted.
Communicate functionality: Affordances and Signifiers
One of the earliest things we discussed in this class is also the source of a lesson that will likely stay with me the longest. In the third week of class, we discussed the concepts of affordances and signifiers. Affordances are the mediums of interaction available to a user in the use of a particular design. For example, a door affords opening inwards, and a ‘PUSH’ label signifies the ability to use it as such. Having discoverable affordances and clear signifiers is imperative to producing a good, usable design.
My group encountered issues with hidden affordances in our interface. The displays afford use in viewing the different paintings and corresponding data, but it was not immediately clear to users upond viewing the screen at idle that that this was possible, and that swiping and tapping were the means by which to accomplish this use.
Thus, we added touch icons, swipe gestures and messages to signify these affordances. While the affordances are obvious to us as designers of the product, the user has no way of knowing what is and isn’t possible unless they explore randomly or are helped by signifiers, the latter being the clear better choice. Going forward, I plan to keep this clarity-aiding principle in mind as I encounter new design challenges.
Explore the Design Space
One of the most valuable parts of our design process was the iterative brainstorming that went into the Project Design 3x4 assignment. My group was forced to upset the dominant design ideas that we had all shared from the beginning, challenging whether they were actually ideal and bringing new previously-unconsidered ideas to the table. Up until that point, my group had largely felt that we knew more or less exactly how our product was going to end up. This pitfall was not aided by the fact that most of us had individually proposed the same idea, and thus were content with leaving it relatively unchanged. Conducting the 3X4, in which we presented three very different design possibilities, provided us with ideas we would not have considered otherwise. images of 3x4 While Iris’ feedback led us to understand that the designs we produced were not quite ‘designs’ in that they were not drastically different from each other aside from the technology they employed, the summative concepts we developed were used together to form the early prototype closest to what we have now. Without purposefully going through this process, we probably would have stuck with something far closer to our original ‘Yik-Yak for museums’ idea and not pushed ourselves to find a design solution that better addresses the problem of museum self-consciousness. In future design situations, I will certainly remember to get outside of my comfort zone and consider design ideas radically different from the one I’m most attached to. Failing to do so would be to miss out on ideas I would never know I could have.
Start Early with Accessibility
Accessibility is one of the areas from which I think the most can be gleaned from reflecting on this semester’s project. Before the class began to focus on matters of accessibility, our group had not put thought into how we could make our design more accessible. It is important to note that our design was initially very reliant on color, required dexterous precision, and also forced direct interaction with the screen to access information, both things that the UK Home Office advises against in its design accessibility guidelines. Once we were aware of these guidelines and others in our readings, we were able to tack-on changes to our design that made it more accessible, such as providing large, non-color-reliant visualizations in our interface so as to make data accessible to individuals with visual impairments.
These changes did not, however, address the aforementioned underlying accessibility issues with our design. We were at a point in our process at which modifying the interaction forms fundamentally necessitated by our design was not feasible given the amount of time we had left. In a new scenario, I will be sure to hold accessibility as a core value when beginning to ideate, so as to avoid a situation in which the inherent nature of our design excludes certain populations.
Ethics: Inclusion and Protection for All
The two ethical issues I feel I’ve most learned about through this design process pertain to inclusivity and privacy protection. The Amarteurs design is founded on these two ideas in that we hope to provide a feeling of inclusion to museumgoers by offering them a space to share their reactions while their identity remains private. As we’ve seen with the myriad user-data scandals over the past few years, a loss of privacy can be extremely hurtful or even harmful for users, even in cases when the data seems benign. Developing this design has made me feel more tangibly the responsibility of keeping such data secure. Of course, I haven’t dealt with any user data, but I can imagine how an individual might feel if one of their comments was linked to their name. By securely protecting user data, Amarteurs is better able to provide a convincingly safe, and thus inclusive, environment to its users. I will carry these lessons of the importance of user data protection along with me to new scenarios, always understanding that anonymous data should stay that way no matter how insignificant the data seems.
Conclusion
Going forth, while I might not remember the details of each possible info layout, I will certainly hold on to these five tenets of design I’ve gathered over the past few months. Further, I would recommend that you take these tried and true lessons away too. Remember that the user doesn’t know everything about your design that you do, and that they want their data protected at all costs. Communicate exactly what your design does and how its functions can be accomplished. Try out designs radically different from the one you might have in mind at first, and make them accessible to all from the get-go.