Overview of Final Project

Overview of final project

My team mates and I started out this project with a wrong approach because we were so keen on specifying the functional aspects of our product design right from the start. At that point of time, we thought that this is an easier approach for us to develop our product design later on. However, we later on realize that UX is not about good specifications or even good functions. It is about how users feel when they interact with our product. To do so, we have to go through numerous steps of user testing, interviews and analysis. With that, although very tempting, we resisted from churning out specifications before we even conducted any user research. We find that in many moments, AFTER conducting user interviews, our assumption of what users what is very much different from what we thought to be. However, a challenge here is to balance out the opinions given by different users because every user gave out various subjective comments which could vary quite vastly from one another.

From the start, we focused on the elder age group because we see an impending need to focus on the age-related problems which comes with the phenomenon of graying population. After recognizing the need to focus on the elderly target group, we began with user profiling, persona building which allows us to have a better understanding of the values, problems, needs, wants and expectations of the elderly population. With these, we find it much easier to detail out the functional and user requirement of our product.

During the different phases in our project, we made effort in revising and referring back to the requirement analysis as different stage of interviews often reveal a change in needs and wants. Thus, these requirements acts as a check list for us to make sure our product design improve in terms of UX.

A challenge for our projects comes at phase 3 because throughout the 4 stages in phase 3, we see rejections in our product ideas frequently. Mr Reddy often reminded us that it is about the design process and not the product design. But somehow, it is very difficult to translate our user research to UX in our product interaction process because our respondents at times do give contradicting and vague answers. For instance, in phase 3C, we see a change in the needs of users from security to usability. This came as a surprise for us too because users right from the start kept emphasizing on security as their number one priority in a lock design. But after we developed our prototype, we observe through interviews that they are more concern about ease of use and convenience. This shows that users many times subconsciously might want other needs. Hence, as designers, we have to constant look out for hints in the responses respondents give. Additionally, we also find difficulty looking at the whole picture because we tend to develop specific features based on the requirements. It is quite a challenge to step away from these small details and reinvent them into the whole picture of UX. What we have done in later stages were to analyze the users’ interaction with our product and from there adjust the various areas to create UX as a whole.

In phase 3c, we developed a ‘high’ fidelity prototype. But due to limited resources, we did not manage to build up a prototype which resembles our real product in detail. Therefore, we do see disappointment in our users when we showed them our prototypes because they were unable to visualize our final product properly. Hence, we decided to develop a better albeit still not good enough high fidelity prototype. This time, users gave more positive and assured comments to rate our product specifications.

In the final stage, our product specification draws down to :

- tapping key control
- central locking system
- stainless steel foldable gate
- automatic unlocking and locking mechanism based on sensor tapping detection
- automatic lock mechanim based on infrared body move sensor detection
- sensor alarm to detect cut through of lock
- conventional key as back up plan

At each stage, we held back ourselves from falling into the functional trap by reviewing if each of these features do add on to the overall UX. After this project, I finally understanding that simplification is the key to enhancing UX.