The Moonlighting Student

Approaching User Experience

February 5th, 2010 7:41 am —  8 views

As we reach the 1/3 point of this semester, there isn’t much let up. It’s going to be a lot more exercise problems, reading, group meetings, and paper writing.

In between school and the whirling dance of complex interactions that is software development, I find myself making connections to things I’ve studied during the the last 7 semesters1.

Whether I’m talking to a classmate, sharing insights on group dynamics, or discussing how to implement new features in an existing product interface, the principles, questions, concepts, and lessons learned on perception, cognition, architecture, collaboration, design, and innovation all come to mind providing me with words to better articulate or question.

So that’s a long winded way of saying that this school stuff might really work. Education isn’t a tangible thing. Sure, there’s a piece of paper that can be framed and hung on a wall somewhere, but that piece of paper doesn’t solve problems. Education, besides expanding the mind by exploring the depths of the world, builds in our minds a lens that can be used to find new ideas.

The lens in my mind has been focused on how people use technology to get things done. Fundamental to using technology is the interaction, the engagement, the experience of it.

To understand experience is to understand multiple perspectives and circumstances. Insights can come from watching the experiences of others. It can also come from experiencing something oneself. Experience resulting from interactions with products and services all happen within certain constraints. The establishment and modification of these constraints is one side of the innovation coin. The other is finding those ideas nobody else can see.

And that’s where the lens I mentioned comes into play.

Time for me to go to work. I feel a little like I have a cold starting to form in my sinuses and throat. That’s not cool.

Image: Took this in the lowest level of the U of M Law Library while searching for a bathroom. The place is freaky huge. And lots of green carpet.

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  1. 7 semesters = Fall 2006 – Spring 2010 [↩]

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