Jesse Orndorff

GDO710 - Personal Case Study Video

This is my personal case studio video for GDO710 - Heavily edited as the first draft was over 10 minutes! Notes and references below the video.

Personal Case Study Video Notes:

My aspirations in pursuing my Master’s in User Experience Design have come from a desire to see a stronger professional community of UX researchers in South East Asia. As someone who has worked in South East Asia for over 10 years, I’ve come to understand how little design policies for accessibility, user research, and user experience design has been focused on smaller, less developed countries. And while economic giants like Singapore have resources and community around UX design and policy, many countries in the region do not have access to these resources. Technology design decisions are largely made from western, or more developed countries, forcing local populations to learn and adapt to complex UI methods from resources that were never designed for their specific context.

One of the primary things this module has helped me accomplish has been to become a practitioner of critical reflection. Critical reflection allows for constructive reflection of a process or project, to help learn, optimize, and build an action plan for future work. As part of this program, the critical reflection journal provides a way to document all my process and learnings throughout the program. This process was incredibly difficult for me to start with, realizing that many of my reflections focused largely on what was done and less on why I did it, what I learned, or what I’d need to change.

By using the Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, a reflection process that leads you through six stages of exploring an experience, I was able to apply a framework that could help me think through all aspects of my experiences. Through this process, I can see direct ties to my work in technology design and policy research in SE Asia. Having a critical reflective mindset allows for better adaptation and the ability to be agile in the work I do. Helping organizations understand their processes and enabling them to make the best policy decisions can be challenging but working with them to be better reflective practitioners has led them to better results (Yuen Lie Lim, 2009).

The rapid ideation sessions allowed opportunities for me to explore various methods of ideation, prototyping, and building functional prototypes. Overall, my goal for both ideation sessions was to incorporate a new process or technology that could help me grow as a UX practitioner.

For my first rapid iteration session I focused on prototyping an adopt-a-creature app, where a child could adopt an augmented reality endangered species on their phone that they would need to take care of. The idea came after conducting a mind map to map out my initial ideas.

Lessons from First Rapid Iteration Session:

First, my initial time and resource scoping of the project was significantly off. I vastly underestimated the amount of time I would need to conduct initial research, sort and filter ideas, and wireframe the concepts. For future projects, I need to provide myself a more detailed list of tasks and identify any potential time blockers or wasters. Additionally, user stories could help drive focus on what features to focus on. This would help mitigate scope creep and allow myself the ability to work through a more comprehensive to-do list. I did not get as far as I wanted on this project, which ended up limiting the scope of my prototype to only 3 screens, with no real flow. If given the opportunity I would want to revisit this project and try to find a way to implement an entire user journey.

Second, my focus for this project was mostly on the final output. I really wanted to explore VR as a possible solution for this and got stuck on the idea. Although we were told to use the time constraint to our advantage, I focused on what I wanted to do, rather than what the time would allow. By letting the timeframe influence the end goal, I could have better focused on a novel mechanic or idea rather than spending too much time moving in the wrong direction.

Third, I have learned that this course is asking us to reflect on our creative process. It is helping us better understand why we make the decisions we do and how we can better approach them in the future. Going forward it will be important for me to focus on the process, rather than the final prototype. My goal is to seek to understand what works in my process and what does not work.

My second rapid prototype was a remix of the first prototype, I was frustrated that I didn’t get as far as I wanted to with the concept and wanted a chance to redeem that work with the learnings from the first session. After using the SCAMPER method to reevaluate my original work, I came up with a simple game idea for promoting conservation of endangered species. From there I wanted to see what has been done in the space already. I found a great journal article entitled “Digital Games and Biodiversity Conservation”. This article concluded that, “Digital games and the virtual worlds they bring into be-ing have become significant factors in the way humans understand and respond to global problems” (Sandbrook, Adams and Monteferri, 2014). And it’s exactly that type of behavior I wanted to explore with this prototype.

Lessons From Second Iteration Session:

Game mechanics should be the focus of the game designer Now, any real game designer would be shaking their head at this point. Interesting game mechanics are the primary work of a game designer. But this was my first effort in game design and my focus was more on learning the new tools and looking to understand an approach. In the future I would want to spend time exploring game the potential mechanics.

Get your prototype in the hands of users Since this prototype was focused on children, I had my daughter play test the game. The feedback and observations she provided was invaluable to my design choices. Watching her play each level allowed me to see where users could get stuck, or not understand a solution to a puzzle.

Choose the best tools for your prototype With the limited time and scope of just two weeks, I wanted to explore a new technology, but not have it too complex so I wouldn't be able to implement my prototype in the time given. Buildbox was a fantastic tool for a rapid prototype, out of the box it provides a few common 2D game types, where you can add in custom mechanics to playtest. With more time to learn, I could see this being a very helpful tool to rapidly prototype a new game mechanic without having to do a lot of base configurations to your levels.

Key Practice Areas include:

  • User Research

    • Focus on social impact, social enterprises, international development (ICT4D)

  • Academic Research

    • Accessibility policy and inclusion through user experience

  • Design Thinking

  • Project Management

    • Agile methodology in design context

  • Social impact and how technology is being utilized

  • Data-driven design decisions

I realize I have some ambitious goals for my personal development. By using the SMART goals framework I can focus on setting the appropriate goals that reflect where I want to be. By utilizing this simple framework, I can work to better define my specific goals, make sure they are measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Looking at what I want to achieve and where I am aiming my career, I can see a few primary goals for my personal development:

  1. Conduct one user research project using mix-methods that focuses on how social enterprises in Southeast Asia design their digital products and services by the time I complete all 4 modules of my program. Research should include social enterprises and technology.

  2. Develop a prototype mapping tool that highlights relevant digital tools for ITC4D, their relevant licenses, prices, technology stacks and test this prototype with relevant stakeholders in ICT4D community. Use design thinking, user stories, and rapid prototyping techniques to design the solution. Research areas would include design thinking in developing countries and data for international development.

  3. Research user accessibility best practices and requirements from relevant government departments, academic journals, and communities of practice. From the research develop a working policy document for Cambodia.

References

Sandbrook, C., Adams, W. and Monteferri, B., 2014. Digital Games and Biodiversity Conservation. Conservation Letters, 8(2), pp.118-124.

Yuen Lie Lim, L., 2009. A comparison of students’ reflective thinking across different years in a problem-based learning environment. Instructional Science, 39(2), pp.171-188.