OUGD504 - Brief 4 - Freed By Design Talk

OUGD504: Brief 4: SONY music / ONLY studio Brief

Freed By Design Talk

Kimberly from Freed by Design came into the studio to give a brief introduction to user experience design (UX). She talked through how she became involved in user experience design and its relationship to graphic design. She highlighted the point of informed research within a project as the greatest design in the world still needs to be able to connect with the audience it needs to be marketed at to ensure success for the client. The feedback loop in terms of user experience is often a lot more user focused to ensure a successful resolution to the brief she highlighted this sketch visually representing her typical design process; 

The second half of Kimberly's talk focused more on 'what is a user' she defined these as;

• Consumers 
• Customers 
• Audience 
• People 
• HUMANS

She stressed the fact that we seem to neglect that users are humans with physical emotions just like us and that we need to design with humans in mind not just 'users' which become much more structured and stereotyped. From this we looked at different research techniques to help collate data from these HUMANS. She explained several research techniques that can be fast, efficient and most importantly cost effective. 

FOG - asking if this is a FACT, OPINION or GUESS, is important when designing for an audience as it allows the audience to remain at the focus and for the design to not run off in sporadic directions. 

Surveys - Utilising social media networks with free tools such as survey monkey to quickly compile a range of usable data that can be applied to the development of the design. 

Coffee Shop Test - Asking to buy people a coffee in exchange for their opinions on a product, feature or development of the product

Observation - getting out to the places your target audience are, experiencing the same environments they do to get a better understanding of how they live and what appeals to them. 

We then took part in a workshop sing another research technique, I was tasked to create some lean personas of the target audience for the current ONLY/SONY music brief. These personas look at creating individuals to make them more real and unique than compiling from stereotypes looking at demographics as well as their needs and wants from the product. As my target audience was made up of males and females I creates two personas that I can refer back to when designing asking the question 'would this appeal to [persona name]'

This talk/workshop helped me to understand more about the importance of appealing to an audience on a commercial level. I have gained a better knowledge of research techniques and how I can apply the to current and forte briefs as well has having a much better insight to user experience design and how this can affect the success of a product.