The design process formed the framework and outlined the steps needed to create a meaningful product that provides fundamental utility to users. A design-thinking process is important now more than ever with innovation and new technology happening at a rate greater than ever before. While the technology created today offers a wide array of new capabilities, these new technologies add complexity and, more often than not as we see today, are implemented in a manner that doesn’t translate to the increased welfare of society. Creation inherently involves design, and good creations ultimately require good design practices. When followed, design-thinking organizes and sequences steps to create products that can even be formally considered technology, the application of knowledge for practical purposes. From going through these steps, my design process was defined by five key points, essential to any application: user empathy, specifically 1) user research through 2) contextual inquiry 4) accessibility 5) ethics.
User Empathy
One of the most important principles of the design process is its emphasis on users. Building products for users mandates an understanding of the problems and motivations of users. While this may seem obvious, users can be easily left out of the equation when building products. If you consider the parties involved in creating technology, no party truly represents and gives voice to those who the product is being created for. Though the parties involved with making the product may be potential users, their direct role in creating the product taints and biases their part as users. For examples, engineers may come up with an idea for a product that makes their lives easier. However, when actually building the product, as makers, they think technically and logically at every point and so create solutions with the unconscious base assumption that all users are guided by this same logic and understanding of the system at hand. Those coming from a business perspective are tainted by considering the product through the lens of turning profit, the conceptions of which may overlap at some points with the user’s perspective but also may contradict it. User empathy brings the user back to the forefront of product creation, a feat more difficult to reinforce than expected. This strain came up at many points of our design process.
Contextual Inquiry
Empathizing with users was key in the first stages of more clearly identifying the problem we sought to solve. Our user research began with a contextual inquiry observing people at Mass Moca. The exercise gave us a better picture of the setting by providing an unbiased, external perspective of the user journey. We were forced to set aside our own assumptions of the world and the problem, which was critical because up until this point, the problem had initially chosen and considered through our own personal lenses. By observing, we immersed ourselves in the problem space and got an actual picture of the experiences and motivations of our potential users. In particular, being in the physical environment of the problem space was paramount to adjusting our biases. For example, by observing the way in which individuals moved throughout the museums, seemingly not directly relevant to our research question, I noticed how museums currently fail in informing museum-goers of information conducive to the art learning process. During a break to organize interview notes, I found a room partitioned off from the rest of the museum exhibits. The space had couches and a table and was presumably meant for visitors to rest at. After idling in the room for a while, I noticed a stack of handouts on the table. Picking one up, I saw that the pamphlet described one of the exhibitions there, showed a map of the museum, and provided information on the artist’s background and motivation for her pieces. However, while I was there, the space was only happened upon by visitors by chance. When they sat in the room, they only went on their phones and rested before continuing on to look at the exhibit, not even seeing the pamphlets. I would not have even picked one up or realized the pamphlets had been for visitors if I had not been sitting there a while. Yet, the pamphlets were clearly for users and meant to solve the problem of not understanding the art exhibits. There was a clear break in communication between the art museum and its visitors. Without this observational analysis and focus on the user, we would have never perceived these failed attempts of communication on the part of the museum, which better informed the need for our product to provide a better, convenient medium to communicate context to users. This visual of the user journey also later illustrated our user scenarios, which also reinforced the focus on the user throughout the rest of the design process.
(More) User Research
Additionally, during our contextual inquiry, we saw how many museum-goers more often than not came with other people; the museum was a social experience to some extent. Yet, the atmosphere of the space was quiet, as users walked around the museum, engaged also in a solitary experience. The museum experience was a balance between the two, which we needed to account for in our design. It also demonstrated how an integral component of the learning process was internal. Our contextual observations were limited in this way, as we needed to conduct interviews to better understand the inner thought processes of the user. Our semi-structured interviews took place both inside and outside the museum. Inside the museum, approaching pieces with users and asking them about their current thought process resulted in determining that learning was the goal of museum visitors and that impediments to learning stemmed from not knowing enough context about the pieces. Empathizing with users narrowed down our problem from being about the ambiguity of art in museums to solving the lack of context museums aren’t currently providing to visitors. Unbiasedly empathizing with users became somewhat more difficult in implementation with interviews. Interviews conducted outside the museum re-created the scenario and current user journey of looking up more background information about art pieces. Re-creating the scenario through semi-structured interview in this way was really helpful in learning about the current user experience of learning about art. However, these interviews were subject to much more interpretation on the part of the interviewer, as interviewees cannot be trusted to understand their own motivations. The conclusions we came to from these interviews were very influenced by how we decided to structure our interviews and how we chose to analyze their responses to determine the underpinnings of what users want. Our personal bias was always somewhat present, so empathizing with users by means of interviews was limiting.
Ethics
Ethics must be at the forefront of design. While it may seem obvious that designers should strive to create ethical products, after going through the design process, I see how ethics can be surprisingly easy to stray from. In our own design process, because ethics was brought up at the end of the semester, we didn’t really apply this principle throughout the stages of creation. Looking back, even though the aim of the project was to further learning outside the classroom and to create a product that served a moral purpose, there were some design hazards that weren’t entirely ethical. For example, we didn’t consider data privacy to put in place for users. With a social platform for discussion and personal user art profiles, there also must be restrictions on accessing others’ information. Some users might find that the content of their art profiles is sensitive or personal, in which case should they choose to not share, they shouldn’t have to. Should there have been more protective barriers put in place in the discussion page in order to give users more autonomy over their data? With the museum profile launch page, we assumed that we could pull a user’s location, as other mobile applications do, and display to users where they were in real-time. Our user research indicated that the physical context space of the museum affected the experience and learning of art in museums. However, there could be negative ramifications for pulling this location-based information, and, more significantly, consolidating all this information together, so that all users in a given museum can be identified at once.
Just as I realized in hindsight with our project, there can be no sacrificing some ethics for some greater achievement that’s ethical. Without prioritizing ethics, not being ethical may seem harmless at first but this relegation of ethics has a tendency to beget decidedly unethical behavior, as we see in the current state of the glaringly unethical tech industry. Reading some of the assigned ethics articles, I didn’t at first see how unethical the actions of the companies were because their use of user data today is commonplace. People often say that in line with how the oil industry profits off and competes for drilling oil, today’s big tech companies profit off and compete for data. However, applying the The Signal Code to these scenarios reveals how their conduct violates almost all ethics. The code of ethics is not too stringent or unreasonable to abide by. Industry is designing and creating so many unethical tools that our eyes have glazed over.
Undergoing the design process has ultimately evinced that, In addition to the Code of Ethics established, the following must also be ethical mandates:
- Ethics does not just relate to the higher-level purpose of the product or of the conception of an idea. It must be relevant at every point of the process and followed by every design choice
- In particular, we must work toward transparency of data usage between users and companies
- The ethics of a design must be continually re-evaluated with each iteration of a design or even more frequently. It is the responsibility and determination of designers to continually strive toward improving ethics.
Accessibility
Like ethics, accessibility must not only be relevant to the solution set of the problem designers seek to solve, like in our project, which sought to increase the accessibility of learning about art. Accessibility must be considered throughout the design process, which we failed to do. While conducting the contextual inquiries pushed us to consider different types of end users, we lost sight of this as the process moved forward. The rest of our user research examined Williams students. In our research, after determining that learning was the primary goal of museum-goers, we assumed that this learning goal was directed and self-motivated. However, our sample was mostly Williams students, already with a higher standard of learning and expectations, motivated to learn. A literature search later evinced that although learning is the goal of museum visits, this goal can be either undirected or directed and self-motivated or unmotivated. In the end, our solution was tailored to those already in search of information and motivated to learn. Our design benefited a target group that doesn’t appropriately help the group would benefit the most from more accessible learning in museums, those who are currently uninspired to learn. Creating accessible products both directly and indirectly benefits all users. It directly benefits all users, as, obviously, more users can now enjoy the product. Indirectly, features incorporated for the intentional purposes of accessibility, for the targeted use of those disabled or marginalized, end up benefiting other users it wasn’t necessarily intended for as well. For example, the accessibility feature of making your iPhone screen screen was specially designed for those with vision impairments or the color blind. However, I have come to frequently use this feature in order to combat phone addiction and really appreciate it. Likewise, the feature provides an useful alternative display mode in dimly lit areas or when using apps that have overwhelming, intrusive saturation color palettes. Accessibility ultimately improves products and truly benefits all users.