As a human-centered designer, one of my primary motivations is to represent the opinions and perspectives of the people I am designing for. During my bachelor, I primarily relied on semi-structured interviews for user evaluations. Therefore, during my master, I wanted to broaden my skill set by exploring and applying diverse methods of user interaction and evaluation, in order to become a more well-rounded designer.
I explored online methods for collecting user insights, using online resources and networks to reach a broader audience than ever before. For instance, in the Community Xperience design (CX) course and my research project, I used the social media platform Reddit to engage with global target groups. Reddit served multiple purposes, including gathering information during ideation phases and evaluating my ideas. Additionally, I used the crowdsourcing platform MTurk to distribute a questionnaire during the CX course, allowing me to gather feedback from participants worldwide. These were valuable experiences because I learned about the benefits and challenges of online methods for user research.
Because I recognize the importance of involving users throughout different stages of the design process, I experimented with different approaches across my master’s projects. In my research project, for example, I conducted workshops to co-create with my target group, incorporating their perspectives early in the design process. In contrast, during the development of Slumber my target group was more difficult to reach than I originally anticipated. Because of that, I changed my process to incorporate an expert for target-group validation and changed he goals of my user tests. Instead of testing the effectiveness of Slumber on sleep, I employed multiple quantitative questionnaires and did interviews to gather insights on user experience, anxiety and mindfulness.
Early in my master, I realized that while I frequently worked directly with users, I had limited experience incorporating expert or professional opinions. To address this, after identifying insomnia as the focus for my third project, I consulted a sleep expert to gain insight into their perspective. Their expertise informed the development of Slumber, as they contributed insights into insomnia treatment and evaluated my evolving concept. This experience taught me how to effectively engage with experts by asking the right questions, valuing their specialized knowledge, and integrating their insights into the design process to ensure informed and impactful outcomes
Relevance to Identity and Vision
Interacting with users and using their insight and opinions is one of the key aspects of being a human-centered designer. However, before my master I did most user evaluations through semi-structured interviews, and this limited the type of insights and feedback that I received. Throughout my master I explored many different types of user interactions and evaluations to discover and try different methods of collecting user insights. These experiences will help me in the future to pick the right methods that fit the different circumstances that I will design for.
