This week I received the brief for my next module, DM7903: Design Practice, which appears to be heavily focused upon assessing my iteration and ideation techniques. The assessment criteria requests “breadth and depth of design sketches,” which show “clear progression… initial concepts to finished digital design visuals”, so it’s imperitive that I make use of the development techniques that I learned in my first year study, such as sketching, wireframing, and paper prototyping. I feel quietly confident about knowing the theory behind using these techniques, but I’m aware that I need to practice them more.
Upon reflection, my paper prototype for the DM7917: Emerging Media module was quite rudimental, so I’m keen to explore how I could push the boundaries of my knowledge in these area, and really explore the benefits of paper prototyping. Of course, to some extent this depends on the project I choose to complete.
In terms of producing a project for this module, I’m intrigued by experimenting with Augmented Reality (AR). I have never worked with AR before although have some knowledge of it (limited to Pokémon Go and football games on TV). I think that there’s potential for me to create a prototype of an AR experience, or something along those lines, but this will need a bit more exploration over the coming weeks. My intention to focus on producing an AR experience could even lead me to exploring some time-based visualisation techniques too, such as storyboarding, which could further strengthen my planning skills.
Based on my performance in prior modules, I’ve identified this module as an opportunity to implement some changes to my workflows:
Firstly, feedback from my most recent module stated that I may have included too much reflective writing on my online portfolio. A suggestion from my lecturer was to consider more creative methods of explaining my processes, such as animation. With this in mind, I may attempt to Vlog, or demonstrate at least some of my creative processes using Youtube. Despite attaining good grades in all previous modules, I can see my lecturers point – I need to find more efficient, engaging and appropriate methods of recording and communicating my learning.
I’m hoping to continue my focus on accessibility, which I’ve so far addressed in both DM7921 and DM7917. This is an area of study that I notice I’m beginning to feel quite strongly about, so it makes sense to lean in to this interest. Most recently in DM7917, I considered my application’s prototypes from the point of view of a user with a vision impairment. But unfortunately, I spent much of my time paying attention to colour contrast, yet neglecting other relevant features such as text resizing. Of course, the process was an education for me, but it definitely shows an area for improvement. For this reason I’m going to approach accessibility with an open mindset at first, hoping to narrow down my focus to a specific area of accessibility as the project continues. I think that this approach will allow me to learn a lot more about a very specific area of accessibility.
If possible, one other area I would like to explore is user feedback. If I decide to create an AR experience, perhaps via an app, it would be beneficial for me to collate user feedback of competing applications, to find common trends. Hopefully, these trends may identify limitations in other developer’s solutions, which I could rectify in my own.
Finally, as this module appears to be quite focused on iteration and ideation, I’d like to hasten my usability testing process, which I began in DM7917. Although the process was brilliant for gaining useful user feedback, it was a timely and inefficient process, limiting what I could achieve within the module’s timeframe. As a strategy, I intend to only employ usability testing when I am purposefully testing the prototype, such as when I’m integrating a new feature or testing the interaction between the user and the experience. Each usability test will be focused on one or two specific tasks, and prototypes will be built to only achieve those tasks, rather than being a broad and ‘open’ experience.