Lessons Learnt

Obviously I leant a lot about User Experience Design. That is to be expected, since the module IS about User Experience Design after all.

What is more interesting, to me, are lessons learnt outside the scope of the syllabus. Perhaps you can call it the hidden or latent syllabus. Or perhaps it was intended all along.

Instead of a boring and seemingly never-ending narration, my bonus learnings can be summarized in one neat list:

(in no order of importance)

• The room that we have our lessons in is miserably cold at times
• The walls of the lecture room are pathetically thin
• Drinking cold beverages before entering an air-conditioned room can cause severe shivering
• Canadians are often mistaken as American
• Different working styles within a group can create good results
• MS Access can be used to do some really cool stuff
• Eusoff Hall has some very interesting rooms filled with interesting things
• Asus laptops come with cheap plastic panels
• You know you can work with someone when group discussions often go off-topic
• Design is meant to be a one man process
• Multiple opinions on design give birth to disfigured Chimeras
• Door alarms in NUS can be circumvented with a piece of paper
• AS6 has a computer lab on the fourth storey
• The computer lab in AS6 is for SoC students only
• SoC students and FASS students have different working styles
• People actually go for speed dating sessions in Singapore
• Laptop bags can be transformed into pillows, aka Naptops
• Splitting a module into two classes can mean you receive only half the ideas and inspiration
• It is easy to criticize, but hard to compliment
• There are several places to smoke (illegally) in NUS if you inspect every nook and cranny
• When asked to come up with User Personas, students never come up with negative ones
• It is interesting to see how students tackle assignments in the absence of narrow guidelines

I probably could go on forever listing them out, but I guess I’ll stop here.

This module has prodded me one step closer to being a good designer. It convinced me that user-centric design is the way to go now. Focus on user experience can only result in one thing – user contentment. And that is of paramount importance. Aesthetics is not the be all and end all of design.

Practice makes perfect. Armed with the knowledge gained and tools received, there’s nothing to stop me from going out there and gaining more experience.

Thank you for the excruciatingly frustrating, yet immensely rewarding module.