UXO720 - Week 12 - Reflection Week
As I bring my work to a close for this module I wanted to explore a few of my thoughts and feeling around what I learned. This module was a great opportunity to explore the vast areas of UX design and it helped reaffirm to me areas I’d love to continue to explore. I loved the research and user interview part of this module, learning about what users wanted and needed. I didn’t enjoy the web design phase as much, I’m not sure that is an area I want to explore further. But overall this was a great course with a lot for me to take back to my work!
A few specific areas and thoughts on this process:
1. Learn to allow room for iteration and changes
Developing the MIV e-commerce system has been a great opportunity to learn how to fully navigate an entire design process from concept to functional prototype. The process really helped me better understand how quickly we need to be adaptive and iterate on our ideas throughout the entire process. This initial project started as a concept for an impact tracking tool, then a site focused on educating consumers on environmental impact, which was transitioned into an e-commerce website and a dashboard with impact metrics built in, but not the primary focus.
Adaption and iteration are key for a successful UX design project. The more feedback I received, the more interviews I conducted, the more I needed to refine my design concepts. This process was good, but constantly changing things made it feel like the project would never come to a final form. In the future, I think if I allow my project planning to incorporate phases of iteration, that might help my overall process.
2. Challenges with interviews and a ridged product development cycle
There were quite a few challenges along the way in this process. First was trying to schedule user interviews, which it might have been easier to setup interview with my course mates, I wanted to work with potential users in the market. But this meant trying to schedule interviews and user research sessions around their work schedules. The result of this was feedback coming in at different times, not always in line with my course schedule. I had to loop back multiple times to adjust user flows and wireframes based on additional feedback.
3. Responsive web design and development is difficult
Translating my designs into a responsive website took much longer than anticipated and resulted in trade-offs from the design to the functionality of the website. Web development is a balance of compromise between the design and what is possible across multiple devices. I ended up making a few design concessions to make the website work across all devices.
4. E-commerce is a series of very complex systems
E-commerce is a very difficult area to design for, especially if you are working on any backend functionality like I was exploring. E-commerce user flows have a lot of possible areas to explore from the website, to registration, shopping carts, checkout, payment pages, dashboards, shipping, refunds, and customer service. For this project I ended up only focusing on a few key areas as the scope of an entire e-commerce system would have been too complex for this project. But I do have a better understanding of what goes into an e-commerce system and why companies would use an off the shelf solution like Shopify.
Final Feelings & Potential Next Steps
Overall, I’m happy with where I ended up on this project by the end of the module. In terms of next steps I’d want to fully explore the back-end dashboard system looking more at the logistics of the system and how account managers could have a view to order for their customers. I would also want to work with someone to create better marketing copy to help tell the story of the brand and develop out better marketing experience.
This project should serve well the needs of MIV to get to the next phase of their product development process and I am happy that in some small way this can help add value to their work.
Case Study for Mekong Impact Tracker
Video Presentation of the Case Study
Figma files: