Elizabeth's NM4259HM Blog

Introduction The World Interaction Design Day started off with an introduction to the event, company, sponsors and speakers. It was particularly interesting to note that the annual event has a different topic current to the year. This year, the topic was focused on ethics, equity and responsibility. Jonathan Yap - equity and pay The first speaker, Jonathan Yap, is the creator of Design Pay Asia, a platform that collects data on the salaries of design jobs (he left the definition on this relatively broad, ranging from UX designers to architects). The most shocking thing I took away from his sharing of the statistics released earlier this year was that the gender pay gap is a whopping 42% (Figure 1). I did expect there to be a gap but I didn't expect a gulf. He shared stories during the panel discussion that some female designers who found out that they were indeed getting paid less than their male counterparts took this up with their managers and were able to fight for the same pay....

Project 1, done and out! Looking back at this project, there were several takeaways. Firstly, writing the persona and scenarios offered a different experience from previous projects as I kept looking at how I could specify the context to guide my team's wireframing process, trying to incorporate what was taught in class. This included thinking of how the way they hold their phone would affect what's easy to access for them, and how they would interact and be affected by the environment. These details really guided my thinking on where I should place buttons in the wireframes such that users would not find it awkward to get to them.  Secondly, after consultation with Dennis, it was apparent to me that one of the biggest problems I had missed at the beginning of this project was ensuring we had a clear possible problem statement that could be backed up by our user study. It was no wonder that I found this project particularly difficult. The group and I spent many hours trying to ...

 To make this week's discussion more productive, I suggested to my teammates to select one pain point and think of a solution. I thought this to be a good way because we are all users of the app, and as such would have somewhat different ways we think Google Docs could have improved on.  For me, I began to be conscious of when and what I use Google Docs on my mobile. This week especially, I am finding myself using the app more lately (probably because assignments are due soon and I am always out and about). One such instance really brought to my attention the pain point I would like to focus my solution around: When having a meeting, my teammate, who was using a laptop, decided to do notetaking in a table format. As I did not bring my laptop, I was only able to use my phone to contribute. I had a lot of trouble trying to record down information as I could not manipulate the table freely. As soon as my other teammate arrived, I, without a second thought, quickly asked to use Go...

  Reflection #2 Our team met for a short discussion to elaborate further on the pain points of the Google Docs app that we had briefly gone through in our previous meeting. Prior to the meeting, I experimented with editing the same document on both web and mobile versions of Google Docs. In addition, my team and I conducted semi-structured interviews and caught many students by surprise when they realised that they had been unconsciously avoiding Google Docs. We spent quite a bit of time thinking of hwo to phrase the questions to address points we need for our research. The frustrations experienced during my experiment as well as similar sentiments shared from the interview further supported the arguments we had previously discussed. One such instance was table manipulation. One of my interviewees mentioned that they had difficulty trying to find how to insert a table, consequently struggling to add additional rows or columns and even deleting the table. They shared that the experi...

Reflection #1 Before our team meeting today, we were all tasked to propose mobile applications to study for the project. I arrived at two apps that my team and I could consider: Google Maps and Apple Notes. Google Maps I originally wanted to work on the mobile version of Google Maps because of my experience with Naver Maps during my summer exchange in Korea. Though daunting to use an app made and customised for Koreans (you sometimes even have to search in Korean to find certain places), Naver Maps showed me problems I had with Google Maps that I would never have realised until I returned to using Google Maps back in Singapore. This reminds me of what Dennis mentioned in class this week on how there are features we never know we needed/wanted until it was introduced. These features included how Google Maps does not have a fast travel option which essentially tells you which MRT door to stand at for the shortest route to transit to another train line or access the elevators/lifts. Do yo...

Heya! I'm Elizabeth (or Eli for short) :D  This is me ^^  I'm a Year 4 Communication and New Media student from NUS. My hobbies are baking 🍪🍰 (I haven't done it in a while though) and I love to play computer games 🎮. Currently, I'm playing LoL and Apex Legends.  I've always been a fan of Prof. Dennis's modules so I'm excited to see what this module has in store for me this semester! I'm looking to take away a fresh perspective on mobile interaction design (mobile does not mean phone 📵 but rather mobility ) and understand how to consciously use these principles in my designs. I'd like to end this post with a favourite saying of mine - We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing. Let's hope to have a great semester together!