Opinion article on lessons learnt in NM4210

Initial Impression
Upon reading the course description, my initial impression of this course was basically a course on user-centered design. I thought we would learn about interface design and similar topics, to my surprise the course is much more!

Course structure
I thought the topics covered were useful to learn and were presented logically. The course was delivered well, we would learn one weeks lectures then have a small project with respect to the most recent material. The final project allowed us to implement what we've learnt in the course to that point as well as that weeks new learnings. The course structure allowed us to build a routine and plan accordingly for N2M4210 homework.

Final Project
A final project in this type of design course is almost mandatory in order to put theory to practise. The final project for this course did involve a lot of development work that students couldn't really work on until the last couple weeks. I feel that groups that created a website to demonstrate the user experience had an extremely large amounts of work, since they acted as web developers, graphic designers, and user experience designers. In the end, my group was thinking more graphic design and less user experience design.

I understand user experience to involve all interactions with the product. Including hearing about the product, signing up, and using it; I am not sure our final project covered all of those subjects. It would have been interesting to spend more time designing the complete process rather than making our website usable.

Moreover, it would have been interesting learning how to make a product give you a certain feeling everytime you use it or think about it. This is the objective of user experience design and although the final project should include some thoughts on this, I am not sure that we emphasized this point enough.

Application
I learnt a number of user research methods that I'll surely apply to future design projects. I hope that I'll always think user experience design now that I've learnt the concept. The course is full of a number of systematic ways of doing things and I'll surely keep the website as a favourite!