Written by: Hanyue Zhang 2022 Cohort
What impacted me the most in the Neesh project?
I learned a positive attitude toward teamwork, keeping workflow organized and helping finish the job quickly. Influenced by my teammates, I worked harder so that I learned words related to UX/UI design and became familiar with the workflow. During that period, I read a lot about the notification system and better understood how to describe it. It is beneficial for our English learning to join a team with students from different countries.
I should try to express myself in English more often in the future, whether I am on a team with foreign students or a group with Chinese speakers, and I think this is precisely what this project provides us with the opportunity to learn and try out.
Expressions I have learned in class.
The expressions I learned can be broadly classified into three categories.
1. everyday expressions, which range from small daily greetings related to peach culture (How are you? How’s going? How’s your kid’s going?) to sizeable mental health related vocabularies, especially in expressing negative thoughts (e.g. rumination, low self-esteem, lack of connection, imposter syndrome, marginalization, ostracizing etc.). I also harvested methods to present my ideas (what is the elevator pitch, the differences between pitch and presentation…)
2. Game-related expressions include game types (board games, story-rich games, choice-based games, point-and-click games) and vocabularies related to narrative games. The narrative approaches (first, second, and third perspectives) and story structures (fold-back and branch structures). I also learned how to set story nodes and time nodes. What are different archetypes?
3. UX/UI design-related expressions, such as the need to build the criteria for design(using the same font, serif font and sans serif font used in different situations), using the perceptual map to analyze the competing products. I also learned different types of questions in designing a questionnaire, closed questions, open questions for quantitative or qualitative tests, etc.
My contribution
I’m on the team Rainbow dragon, mainly as a researcher.
After we decided to improve the notification system in Neesh, I participated in the early research part; I found some research about how to reduce notification interference and classify different notification types by the amount of information and operational involvement. The former is more of a mechanism, so it is not used. Still, the research on notification types has been applied to our design, and we have added more notification types and used different notification types to display other messages.
After the designer finished the prototype, I conducted three user tests, wrote questionnaires, found people to participate in the tests, analyzed the results and gave feedback to everyone. In the first two questionnaire tests, the results were convincing in quantity and quality, inspiring our design. The same goes for user interviews.
I also participated in every discussion, and although I tended not to give ideas and opinions at the beginning because of my lack of understanding of UX/UI design, I did raise some constructive questions and thoughts later on after I became familiar with its workflow and ideas such as how to integrate our designs into the notification system. We needed some trade-offs because some of our designs overlapped and conflicted regarding functionality or design expression. We need to make some trade-offs because some of our designs overlap and conflict regarding functionality or presentation.
In most meetings, I also recorded critical points and uploaded them to the group in case anyone missed any essential parts.
What went well, and what could you have done better?
In general, I have done my part and achieved good results. My shortcomings were more in communication and initiative. In fact, except for Liting, the other group members needed to become more familiar with UI/UX design and needed real-world experience in this field. Still, they were more willing to ask questions when they were not fully understood and actively offered their understanding than I did. In the future, I should adopt a more active communication style.
For lacking initiative, for example, sometimes I could do more to organize the test results to get more apparent conclusions for everyone. Still, if it is not necessary, I tend not to do it. Our teammates can understand the results without my organization. However, it is essential because the organized report is vital to our clients, who are not involved in the design and testing process. They can only understand what we have done through our reports and presentations. So, I will allocate my efforts to writing clear test reports in the future.