Date: 2/27/2015 10am to 5pm
Location: General Assembly NYC
Description: From General Assembly – “As technology changes and more media outlets compete for customers’ time, providing an enjoyable experience is critical to both attracting and keeping users. This class aims to demystify UX by giving a practical and simple introduction to what UX is while also explaining some of its core concepts of usability. This is a field that affects all areas of business — prepare to dip your toes into an ocean of new concepts and ideas that will enlighten your perspective on the human-computer interaction experience.”
Instructor: Daniel Stillman
Review:
There are two aspects of the course I want to address. The first is the content and the second is the delivery. I really enjoyed this class and found it very informational. I have no formal background in User Experience or User Interface design but have experience dealing with poor user experiences and poor user interfaces (as do most people). I took the class because it seemed interesting and I was especially curious to see what takeaways there were for eLearning.
Some of the things I found most compelling were the phases of the design process, value of interviewing the users, formal methods of organizing information, and how UI designers use rapid sketching and then wire frames to rapidly prototype their designs.
Content
Phases of the Design Process (from Daniel Stillman of The Design Gym)
Examine: Dig into the problem. Look at the history, the context, the objects, and (most importantly) the people involved.
Understand: Go deeper and find patterns. Establish open questions to build on.
Ideate: Have lots of ideas, good and bad. Don’t stop at the obvious or the impossible.
Experiment: Try some things out. Make some things. Fail cheap and fast.
Distill: Strip your solution down to the essentials and tell the story to others.
User Interviews
This process is very similar to the interviews one might do with members of an organization to do a needs assessment. The core principals of getting people to open up about their needs cross industries.
90/10 Balance: The user should talk 90% of the time during the interview and the interviewer should talk 10% of the time.
Use Silence: Ask a question and allow the user time to answer the question and exploit people’s dislike of silence to allow them to fill in that silence with more of their thoughts.
Open Ended Questions: Enables better answers and allows you to explore paths and tangents that may prove valuable but are hard to access via yes/no questioning.
Information Organization
Sometimes we organize information based on what seems obvious to us but we are not the final audience and our biases may lead to a solution that is less clear to the intended audience. Formally thinking about how we organize information causes us to take a step back from the information itself and look at it from a much higher level. Daniel Stillman writes about it well on his site in a post called Organizing Information: L.A.T.C.H.
Delivery
The instructor did a fantastic job with this course. There is a potential for the class to be dry and highly formal but Daniel Stillman does a wonderful job engaging the audience, assessing their needs, facilitating impactful discussions, and adapting the course to work for a diverse student body. One of the joys of this class was his use of a large wall sized white board on which he literally drew the course and the associated visuals. He would ask questions, lecture, and draw to highlight his points. This method gave the class an energy which was fun and made me feel connected to the content. Each major topic had a few key points which remained on the board as other drawings were erased. We watched a white wall grow and evolve in to a powerful infographic-like reference.
The final product of watching the class unfold in front of us.
The instructor also used very effective quick exercises and guided discussions and finally a project which allowed student to put into practice the things that were taught. The project evolved in several stages and each step furthered the learning objectives.
Student posting the final project for instructor review and commentary.
My group’s sketched out workflow for a taco delivery app we developed as part of the final project.
I highly recommend taking this program or other classes with Daniel Stillman and The Design Gym (his company).