Project 1: Reflection #2

 

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 experience was not seamless. Comparing this to performing basic functions like writing text, table manipulation was a clear point of headache.

From doing my own experiment, I found this to be a very helpful exercise as it reminded me of what Dennis had previously said in one of our seminars: We as designers are also users. He also shared something quite inspiring that has changed how I think about and approach design - designers are not just people who create and innovate new things but can be seen as individuals who specialise in solving problems. I often find myself reaching out for references and I always felt demotivated as I thought it to be proof of the lack of my creativity but this insight shared by Dennis has made me think otherwise. It motivated me to study my own designs and carefully examine others not to just find faults but to question and learn about their design.