Week 12 Reflection – Seeing Myself

I went salsa dancing today – as I usually do on Sundays. It was a lot of fun, as always. There were some pretty complicated moves, so I video-taped the moves when an experienced fellow dancer was leading me. When I played the videos, I saw some stylistic issues that I wasn’t aware that I had, and then it just hit me – why not recording my presentations?

Even though I have presented papers at conferences and taught courses, I still have a hard time presenting designs as well as I’d like to. I know I need to make better connection with the audience, but even when I was presenting project 4, which was quite personal to me, I was still having difficulty communicating that connection.

For project 4, our team chose “people who recently lost their ability to drive because of medical reasons” as our target users. A late neighbor of mine fit this profile. From the countless hours of conversations I had with her, I knew how much driving meant to her. Additionally, my mother-in-law is transitioning into our user group as well. At age 91, she has had to reduce the occasions when she drives herself, but she’s not ready to give it up entirely yet. I also interviewed other people from our user group with my team. Coming into our presentation, I had said understanding inside me, but somehow it just didn’t come through as much as I would have liked when I presented our target population.

Can seeing myself in presentations help? I hope so.

Getting to know the Users and Self

The half-known users. Three participatory design articles for the Foundations course. Lots of questions about Project 4. Thoughts from these elements in my brain finally made connections themselves, and it dawned on me: why not doing a participatory design for our project 4? Unfortunately, the thought came too late. Given the availability of our team and potential participants, it’s not feasible to do a real participatory design. I wish we had one more week for this project. Anyhow, at least we probed our users during our user research and usability test. It’s really interesting getting to know them. The particular concerns, wants, struggles, frustrations, and pain points of users are only clear when we actually get in touch with them. When this clarity emerges from murkiness through lots of carefully crafted questions, design is really fun. Lesson learned: approach users as early as possible.

After seeing Jeff Wain work with two teams, and reflecting on what’s been taught so far and when I felt stuck in the process of doing projects so far, now I have a better idea about the importance of asking lots of questions every step of the way to finding the core; developing, organizing, and structuring ideas; and anticipating the nature of feedback from users and sketching and framing questions for them accordingly.

Speaking of users, I’m grateful that my mother-in-law has helped me find users willing to talk and work with us from her retirement community for our projects. There is so much to learn from them that I just wish I had more time.

Now I know why I was attracted to design – part of the reason is my interest in connecting with people and their stories. When I watch Antique Road Show, the most interesting thing to me is the stories people tell about the antiques they bring to the program.

Still, I find it easier to connect with some personality types than the others. It has to do with my inner state – buttons, fears, baggage, etc. Whatever difficulty I have with the outside world ultimately is the projection of my inner world. I shall embark on my own hero’s journey.