Image Credit: Quang Nguyen Vinh
Module Review
The last 12 weeks have been tough, but I have loved every minute. By learning about such a wide variety of topics, I have a much broader view of the fundamentals of UX. How it’s not just designing some pretty websites but how the field is grounded in psychology, creativity, efficiency, and reflection (Runco and Chand 1995; Srivastava et al. 2017). By touching upon so many topics and conducting my own research and reflection, I am now confident that I have several avenues I would love to pursue in my future projects. Although, I could have sought out feedback more often. I realise now that I wait for others to notice my work and provide comments rather than actively seeking input so I can improve as I don’t want to impose on their time.
Smart Goal Review
My Next Adventure: In Progress
I didn’t manage to send an application every week, but I did send out five or six, including two, to companies with a lengthy application process. From these applications, I did one interview and a small UX test where I discussed my favourite web product. Despite resulting in no’s, I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to experience several stages in the UX job hunt. As it meant, I could present myself as a UX designer and gain practice in discussing my new field in a professional setting.
TEE: In Progress
I have been steadily improving my German by conversing daily with various native speakers. I have continued listening to podcasts in German, but sadly the only UX-specific one I could find was from Austria, and I have been struggling with the accent. So instead, I have been content with any podcast, as long as it’s in German.
Each week in the course, I have done my best to be a sponge and jump into every topic with my eyes wide open. As a result, I have read briefly into a wide variety of issues and identified several areas that have piqued my interest. I will use the holiday for further reading, but I’m unsure how to incorporate this (or at all) into my portfolio.
Failure: Achieved
While I didn’t set aside specific time to assess my work, I always had the theory of deliberate practice in the back of my mind (Ericsson et al. 1993). With each challenge, I set out to learn something new and to push my boundaries just enough to keep progressing. I will bring this mindset into the rest of the course.
Module Two Planning
My main objective for the next module is to have a positive group experience. There was a lot of group work in my previous degree, and more often than not, it was a struggle. Reflecting on those experiences, the problems arose from many individuals not taking the work seriously enough, while I took it too seriously. In this module, I will aim to properly communicate my thoughts and feelings to others in the group and to ensure I remain open when I receive feedback.
As this is the first time I have learned about working and management techniques, I look forward to implementing them properly. Coordinating this team project will be the perfect opportunity to really test out what I have learned.
Specifically, I would like to incorporate envisioning, Scrum estimation, stand-ups, project retrospectives and version control (Waldock 2015). I am also quite intrigued by trying out the position of Scrum Master as I am good at keeping on target (Bittner 2017).
Final Project Planning
Looking further forward to the final project that will form the backbone of my fledgling UX portfolio, there is a lot to think about. Since applying for this course, I have kept notes on potential ideas for a final project, including an interactive Buildings at Risk Register as a nod to my experience as an architect or a Basketball Court tracker dedicated to my partner who can never find a good court. However, in week 8, we were introduced to ethics concerning UX design, and since then, the topic has caught my interest. I did some additional reading and learned about ethics relating to design practices and Dark/Anti Patterns (Gray et al. 2018). It is not an area I ever would have suspected of being attractive to me, but I have found it fascinating. My current idea is to dive into the juicy topic of ethics with the research module and then utilise everything I learn when we move to the design module. Alternatively, I am listening to an excellent educational podcast from the Guardian discussing menstruation (Rakusen 2022), so designing a companion educational product for the podcast would also be supremely interesting.
References
BITTNER, Kurt. 2017. ‘Scrum Studio: A Model for Innovation’. Scrum [online]. Available at: https://scrumorg-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/drupal/2017-12/Scrum%20Studio%20A%20Model%20for%20Innovation%20Dec%202017_0.pdf [accessed 23 Jan 2023].
ERICSSON, K. Anders, Ralf T. KRAMPE and Clemens TESCH-RÖMER. 1993. ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’. Psychological Review 100, 363–406.
GRAY, Colin M. et al. 2018. ‘The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design’. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–14. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3174108 [accessed 11 Apr 2023].
RAKUSEN, India. 2022. Welcome to 28ish Days Later. Available at: https://www.bbcpodcasts.com/listen/28ish-days-later/ [accessed 22 Apr 2023].
RUNCO, Mark A. and Ivonne CHAND. 1995. ‘Cognition and Creativity’. Educational Psychology Review 7(3), 243–67.
SRIVASTAVA, Apoorva, Sukriti BHARDWAJ and Shipra SARASWAT. 2017. ‘SCRUM Model for Agile Methodology’. In 2017 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA). 2017 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA), May 2017, 864–9.
WALDOCK, Belinda. 2015. Being Agile in Business: Discover Faster, Smarter, Leaner Ways to Succeed at Work. Pearson Education. Available at: https://r1.vlereader.com/Reader?ean=9781292083728 [accessed 24 Jan 2023].
German vocabulary of the week
Stage one, complete – Stufe eins, abgeschlossen