Entering the world of User Experience

Here’s my story of why I chose UX Designing being a Software Engineer

As a software Engineer, I have always been relying on my functional designers or Strategists to understand the functionality before I start writing the code. Working for a healthcare company, I started realizing how important it is to understand the End User, the way they use the product and how my code can help them rely on the product without a worry or a second thought

When I realized that there is a gap in our understanding of how the Users actually use the application in real time, my interests started to incline more towards understanding the User’s way of using the application and to make sure that it makes their daily tasks easy.

So with this thought I started looking into who are the people responsible for understanding the Users and thus my journey into the UX world began!

To start this journey, I did some research like from where should I start, from where should I learn this etc. Then I found out about the “GrowthSchool” on my Instagram feed.

My journey with GrowthSchool

As a person who don’t enjoy academic way of learning, I found a perfect course for myself! No regular 1 hour classes, no reading big fat text books and no EXAMS! Its all about practical way of learning things, the approach is something like — do things, understand why your doing it and what are the outcomes of doing it, if something goes wrong, no worries, redo it and this time you know mostly the right way to do it.

With this raw approach, I started with my first project which was called “Design Thinking”

The whole batch was divided into group of 5 and each one of them was assigned with a Room of a house, example — Member1 got bathroom, other one got bedroom and another one got kitchen and I got Living room.

And my problem statement was “Given a room of the house, identify the pain points of the Users with respect to their experience with the given room and come up with the solution for it”

Well now you might think why would a UX designer identify the pain of the user w.r.t their living room, there is nothing technical here and everything seems to be like a problem of an interior designer! :/

Well same was my question, why am I doing this? How is this relevant to this course? But sometimes we just have to go with the flow and slowly the things start making sense. So lets see how this problem statement made me realize things about UX design thinking.

So we were given a workbook where each part of it had some instructions about what has to be done and this is how the flow was -

Empathize the user

With this step, I had to prepare myself to interview my users (Group members), the topic is so common that every one were the target users for living room. Once I was ready to interview, I scheduled 1 on 1 calls with the users and interviewed them.

The main idea was to understand how the User is using the Living room, what are their likes and dislikes with respect to their living room and just get to know their perspective about every aspect of their living room, listen to things that they talk out loud, understand their feelings/gestures that silently tell a story in the background and collect as much data as I can possibly get.

Once this step was done, I had to analyze the data that was collected from the Users.

Here’s a glimpse of my data post analysis

Once I understood my users and the way they used their living rooms, I moved on to the next part of the workbook which spoke about something called Define.

Define the problem

Now that I have the data, I need to look for all the problems that the users are facing and see if there is some common problem within the bigger set of problems.

When I started reading the interview notes, I found out that the majority of them spoke about the living room space being cluttered and unorganized and it was disappointing to see the messy space.

Now we all know that, a living room is usually the first room to be entered in a house and coming home to a very unorganized space makes the user feel very unpleasant ultimately. Be it a big space or a small cozy one, organized and functional space is very important. Therefore, I chose this problem to solve.

At this point I know what’s the problem that I’m interested in solving, the next step was to start thinking of possible solutions, therefore the next part of the workbook was called Ideate

Ideate Stage

So here we were asked to do a fun exercise called Crazy 8, this asked us come up with 8 ideas in 8 mins, let them be very silly or stupid or good, but write them down.

Now that I have 8 ideas, I need to start ranking them and choose the top 3 ideas. Now to these top 3 ideas, start giving rationale based on the problems mentioned by the users and see how well it fits their situations.

My top 3 ideas —

Now the next step is to come up with a prototype based on these ideas.

Prototyping phase

The top 3 ideas that was identified in the previous stage needs to be prototyped so that the user can see the solution and let me know their opinion about it. So in these top 3 ideas should I just solve one idea or all of them ?

When sat and looked into the idea, found out solving one of them was easier with the time constraints. So I took up the very first idea -

Add Storage Boxes/Baskets to your existing living room items like shelves, tables below/behind sofas to add all the non-living room items in them and make the space look clutter free or well organized.

My prototype for storage —

Why I chose storage box as the best solution is -

> They come in different sizes from small to large

> are available easily in the market

> The price range is also very wide

> Mostly very low maintenance

But then I found out that storage units can be customized based on the user needs, that’s when I thought of combining this storage unit idea with another idea and solve one more problem with this same approach

The other problem was the outside noise causing a pain to the user. For this the solution can be to get these storage units made up of heavy fabrics like velvet, canvas etc. as these materials have the capacity to absorb the noise.

Once the prototyping was done, I had to present it to my users to know their opinion on this prototype. So I scheduled a group call with them to discuss the same.

Testing Stage

In the group call, I presented the prototype to the users, they few of them were ok with this idea of using storage boxes, where as some described about the storage boxes being expensive when they go to purchase them based on their living room aesthetics.

Also, one very important feedback I received from my mentor was -

The solution given is already something that exists in the market, so I should have had a follow up interview with the users to understand why they haven’t used or bought the storage units already?

If I had to follow up and ask the questions in this direction, I might have got a much better solution. So yes this was one of the key learnings for me with this project .

So this was the end of my project. At this point I know that, be it any field, understanding the user or empathizing the user is the most important step in problem solving. This whole design thinking process is a very systematic approach to solve the problem in a very agile manner.

Well now we know why living room problem statement is still very relevant for Design thinking project!

Thank you so much for reading my case study! :)