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Portfolios and Final Thoughts

Creating portfolios is a new concept I learned about at a recent job fair I attended. Since then I have passed out paper portfolios at every job interview I have had with my current employer. Having an online portfolio is not something I had thought about doing and I will have to investigate if this would work for me for future interviews. I was inspired by all the examples I looked at this week and wish I had had the time and knowledge to create one this week. But it seemed like too big of an undertaking with my skills gap in the area. I did find websites which will guide you through the process (for a charge of course), but I think it would make a great addition to my LinkedIn page. Thank you for an inspiring class. I have learned many skills which I am immediately putting into practice for a grant project at iLEAD USA- Ohio.

Protecting Design Elements

This week, while critiquing the final designs of the classmates in my group, I found myself a couple of different times think “Wow, I really like that idea, I wish I had thought of that!” While it would have normally been tempting to integrate these ideas into my own design, I refrained because of copyright issues. This week I was also researching copyright issues for some of the material I plan to use in my Culminating Project over the summer and this is what came to mind when I was struck by the genius of my classmates’ work. If this had been a work project in a real environment, these design ideas would mostly likely be protected by copyright. Using these ideas from others outside my company could then cause legal issues similar to what Apple and Samsung have been going through due to Apple claiming that Samsung integrated some of their iPhone designs into the Samsung phone. While this was a simulated task, I believe that I learned a pertinent life lesson from it.

Recruiting for Usability Testing

This week I definitely got a crash course in recruiting participants for usability testing. Obviously, my pool of participants was not as big as some professional organizations would be but I can imagine that it is not much easier for them. This is most likely why paying participants was discussed during the lessons (I tried bribing with free coffee). This week was Spring break in my area, which could have been a major factor influencing the less than enthusiastic response by my target audience (married women with children, between the ages of 30-55), so I kind of feel like I set myself up for failure. But I also think that this allowed me to really get a feel for what the real process would be like. This part of the job, just may not be for me.

Surviving Graduate School

The suggested topic for group meetings inspired me this week. As a student, in my last semester of classes, I decided to look back over the last three years to see how I have managed to get this far without having everything falling apart.

1. Family is very important. Having family step up and take care of things when I wasn’t able to was a big help. I found that you just have to ask.

2. Being organized. You must be extremely organized to juggle school, work, family, and yourself. I use the course schedules for every class to plan weeks in advance. Also, Mondays, when the course work for the next week was released, was when I would lay out what I was going to do, and when, for the whole week.

3. I have given up pretty much everything extra-curricular for the last three years. If the event or activity didn’t involve family, I didn’t do it. Life will get back to normal once I graduate.

So, those are my biggest suggestions. Attending Graduate School is a very big commitment, one that makes your life not entirely yours anymore. But if it wasn’t worth it in the end, why would we do it?

Week 3 Critiques

I find giving critique much more difficult than receiving it. When giving critiques I always worry about misinterpreting the receivers work, such as what they are trying to accomplish and why. What if there is nothing wrong with their design but I just do not get it? Is this their fault or mine? I also always try to give positive comments on the work to balance out the negative. But should I do this? Is critiquing also a time to praise the work? Will they think I am just trying to be nice about something because I hated everything else?

Receiving critiques is easier for me because I honestly like to know what I can do to improve my work. I am always looking for new ideas and inspirations. If I feel they have misinterpreted my work, I may not make some of the changes they recommended but I will always thoughtfully consider what they had to say.

I also found with this assignment that when I was looking at issues that were pointed out to me, it opened my eyes to looking at all my work in a different light. This led me to making some improvements, that while the critiques I received did not mention them, I thought needed to be addressed.

User Research and Week 2

This week was all about user research. What it is and how to do it. The lectures this week, especially “From Users to Personas to Design Tenets,” were very helpful in visualizing what our finished product should look like. Writing the survey questions and conducting the interviews probably took the most amount of time, but after that everything else just sort of came together. Again, though, never having created any similar documents I will be waiting to see how much I truly understood what was expected of me. Meeting with my group on Saturday night was helpful and I felt I understood some parts of the assignment a little more after discussing it with them. Our group struggled a little to meet, as three of us were out of town this week, but it was worth it in the end. The members of my group all come from different work backgrounds than I do so it will be exciting to learn from their varied experiences and backgrounds.

Diving Right In

This week was definitely all about diving right in. Project proposals are a new topic for me, actually UX in general is a new area for me, but overall I enjoyed the assignment. I understand that the class is only seven weeks and I will probably not be required to revise the project proposal, but I am hoping that I will still be able to use the feedback to learn more about the process and make adjustments on my own time.

I found the readings to be interesting and helpful but wonder about the layout of the “Designing for the Digital Book.” The jumping back and forth between one or two columns per page, in a seemingly random way, was distracting to me. I wonder if there are usability considerations that go into publishing books?

I am looking forward to the next six weeks, if for no other reason than to see what I can accomplish outside my normal zone of work. UX is an interesting area of study that I now pay more attention to than I did 7 weeks ago.

Ending It On a High Point

Overall I found this class to be very exciting and educational. My favorite assignment was creating the persona this week. At the library we use marketing personas, which I found out from doing some additional reading this week, are technically different from UX personas but ultimately I found the concept to be very similar. We use our personas to plan programs and provide services to our target users and refer to them when creating reports and setting goals. I have never actually got to create the persona though; we have a company that does that for us. Maybe I should leave the library and go work for them! I also enjoyed the assignment on creating a workflow. I love flowcharts and often create them for my daughter to help her understand concepts at school. The only concept I feel that I really struggled with was the unit on typography. I really found the assignment on creating a typeset overwhelming. I changed it so many times, I think I just confused myself more. This is one area I will have to work on. Thank you for a great experience!

The Overwhelming Nature of Typography

This week was an overwhelming one. Typography is an area of seemingly endless choices and options which can become quickly overwhelming. There were many great resources shared on student’s Pinterest’s boards this week, many of them containing infographics which aim to simplify these decisions for UX developers. Designing the typeset and then putting it into a practical format required much more time and work than I had originally thought it would. This was largely because I allowed myself to become engulfed in the many types of fonts which are available and changed my tactic several times. I can see why in Mayer’s article, he promotes the idea of having one’s favorite, standard go to fonts that will work in most any project. I think if you start with these fonts which you, as a designer, are most familiar with and use them as the basis for a project, it is then easier to just switch up a few areas to add some flair. Also, by starting a project with a basis of ready, easy to formulate fonts, time is saved during the establishment of a project, allowing a designer more time to then focus just on those areas which they want to stand out.

Putting the Concepts into Action

I learned so much this week not only about web design but also just my own design preferences. I discovered there are reasons why I hang pictures, design flyers at work, and organize my desk the way that I do. While the terms grid theory and golden ratio were new to me, I immediately understood them. I have now started to look at the design of websites and apps more closely and have big plans for redesigning my church’s newsletter, which I am responsible for. I find it a little overwhelming though with all of the concepts that come into play and that need to be remembered when considering UX. But I suppose that is why there is a whole degree that focuses just on UX. I imagine that eventually it becomes second nature, almost like muscle memory in a way. So while UX is not my everyday job, I have actually learned a lot that I can still put to use in my everyday life.

It’s All Coming Together

My big take away this week was not from our readings but from the assignments. More specifically the Personal UX Pattern Collection discussions. Two different students provided help to me this week without even knowing that they were doing it. One student posted about scrum, which is a topic I actually needed to know more about for another class. Then another student posted about the topic of storytelling, which allowed me to expand upon what I learned in another class also. At this point it suddenly hit me that all of the students in our class, with the help of you as facilitator, were really just forming our own large community of practice. We take what we learn in class and expand on it, then share our findings with each other, which benefits the group as a whole as well as each individual. It is really exciting to witness all I have learned over the past three years coming together here at the end of my experience.

Technology Change-overs

This week I found Norman’s (2013) discussion on “People’s Responses to Changes in Conventions” to be very interesting (p. 149). It was interesting because me and my husband had just had an in-depth conversation on self-driving cars. His stance as an engineer is that if they are going to start selling self-driving cars then the whole car industry needs to make the change at one time because otherwise the self-driving cars will not function the way they are meant to, which will actually lead to more accidents, not less. He says that it will not do any good for the self-driving car to know when to stop if all of the cars around it are not reacting in a similar way.

So this conversation is what I immediately thought of when I was reading this section in chapter four. Norman (2013) states that “…if there is to be a change, everybody has to change. Mixed systems are confusing to everyone. When a new way of doing things is vastly superior to another, then the merits of change outweigh the difficulty of change” (p. 149-50). My husband compared it to the switch from vinyl and cassette tapes to cd’s but just on a larger scale. Eventually you will just not be able to buy a car without self-driving technology. I envision this switch over occurring in a similar fashion to the scrappage program that the government had back during the recession which provided incentives for buying more fuel efficient cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrappage_program

Source

Norman, D. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Memory is a Beautiful Thing

I found the chapter on memory in Norman’s book to be very thought provoking this week. I understand after reading it why it is important and how it pertains to the topic of usability so I was surprised that it was not a topic that I had encountered in depth in any of my Knowledge Management classes. Yes, the idea of memory is always implied when it comes to such topics as explicit and tactile knowledge but it has never been discussed in such detail.

As someone with an extremely hectic day to day schedule (work, school, and family to juggle) it always seems the more I try to remember the more I forget. And I have come to learn that if I do not write it down, it is not going to get done because I will forget. So it was great to read Norman’s sections on Knowledge in the Head vs. Knowledge in the World. And the section on Perspective Memory has inspired me to use the reminders which I can easily set for myself through my iPhone. While not perfect, as Norman points out, they can be effective.

Intro to User Experience

This week I was introduced to the field of User Experience for what I thought was the first time. What I found interesting was how I was able to relate what I was reading and learning about to two of my work tasks just this week already. The first instance was when I had to review a site called Kanopy (its a film streaming site) for the Digital Initiatives Committee I am on and one of the questions was “How easy is this site to use (compare to Amazon Prime, Netflix, or Hulu if you use these services)?” The next instance was that I am applying for a grant program through the state library called iLead, where my team has to develop a technology driven product or service. One of the requirements for the program is that each member of the team have their own community user who will examine, test, or otherwise use our product or service at several points during the process and then provide feedback on whether the product or service was useful and/or functioned properly for them. I am excited to continue on over the next six weeks and see how much more I will learn that I will be able to apply so quickly in my current position.

Week 15: Final Thoughts

Overall I found the class very educational and I feel the things I learned will be very useful.

• I really liked the peer grading segment of the class. This is the first time I have been asked to evaluate my classmates work and I appreciated the feedback from Brian on whether my evaluations were on track or not. I would have like to hear from my classmates that I evaluated as to whether they found my feedback useful.

• I liked using Tumblr and reading my classmates posts. Often I read what someone wrote and picked up on something that I had missed in our readings. It was a great additional source of information.

• I liked how the instruction introduced the idea of change management.

• I struggled with the writing style required of blogs a little bit. It was different than the writing I normally do for classes.

• Lastly, I really learned a lot doing the research for my final project and was able to put together the pieces as I went. I am very excited to receive feedback on it.

Week 13: Top 3 Concerns

-My biggest concern at this point is my final product. Will it be usable and helpful? Is it what the professor has in mind? I know our final product was really up to us but will it be good enough?

-Was my peer grading helpful? If any of my classmates turn up in my remaining Knowledge Management courses will they reach out to me because they remember me from this class? I think incorporating more of a back and forth dialogue about the grading comments we receive and if we thought they were helpful or if we incorporated them would give the concept of peer grading more significance.

-Will I get an A? This is always my biggest concern at this point in time with any class that I take. Will my hard work pay off? Did I do enough? Did I gain everything I could from the class? What more can I do?

Collaboration Post

I chose to collaborate with a peer this week that was working on a project similar to my own. We are both concerned with finding ways to retain the knowledge of employees when they leave a company and since we are working on the same topic I thought she might be able to give me guidance on a couple of areas that I had questions about. During the process of writing the email and then waiting for a reply, I realized that I was concerned that my classmate may not want to share her insights or research with me. I imagine this is how many people in organizations that do not have developed knowledge management programs in place feel and I thought about what we had read about knowledge hoarding. Of course, the peer I had reached out to was more than happy to speak with me and gave me some good advice about my project. But now I am curious about how a similar situation would play out in a work situation when replying to my questions would not be required. Would a coworker who was not concerned with getting a good grade be as willing to offer me guidance? I suppose this is what the whole purpose of this class is, to learn how to create environments where concerns like knowledge hoarding will not exist.

#60303collaboration

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