OUGD502 - Visiting Professionals: Freed By Design Talk

OUGD502 - Visiting Professionals: Freed By Design Talk

Kimberly from Freed by Design came into the studio to give a brief introduction to user experience design (UX). She talked through how she became involved in user experience design and its relationship to graphic design. She highlighted the point of informed research within a project as the greatest design in the world still needs to be able to connect with the audience it needs to be marketed at to ensure success for the client. The feedback loop in terms of user experience is often a lot more user focused to ensure a successful resolution to the brief she highlighted this sketch visually representing her typical design process; 

The second half of Kimberly's talk focused more on 'what is a user' she defined these as;

• Consumers 
• Customers 
• Audience 
• People 
• HUMANS

She stressed the fact that we seem to neglect that users are humans with physical emotions just like us and that we need to design with humans in mind not just 'users' which become much more structured and stereotyped. From this we looked at different research techniques to help collate data from these HUMANS. She explained several research techniques that can be fast, efficient and most importantly cost effective. 

FOG - asking if this is a FACT, OPINION or GUESS, is important when designing for an audience as it allows the audience to remain at the focus and for the design to not run off in sporadic directions. 

Surveys - Utilising social media networks with free tools such as survey monkey to quickly compile a range of usable data that can be applied to the development of the design. 

Coffee Shop Test - Asking to buy people a coffee in exchange for their opinions on a product, feature or development of the product

Observation - getting out to the places your target audience are, experiencing the same environments they do to get a better understanding of how they live and what appeals to them. 

I liked the concept of UX design working with the human senses to improve the experience a product/function can have with the user. I think this has great potential and is an important side of the industry to be aware of as brands etc will bode more positively with consumers who have had a positive experience with them resulting in a strong and well established consumer-brand relationship.