Some of you may not know this, I come from a formal science background, I trained as a scientist. However, I don’t consider myself to be one, by any stretch of the imagination. I feel more at home in the design space.
Still all that background in the science arena has allowed me to apply it to the area of User Experience design. A guess it’s like a Science of UX Design.
Creativity is a strange beast. Often creativity is blocking us, running away. We often talk about it, discuss it at length and even say it can be learned. Sometimes it’s even hard to find that creative spark. However what is creativity. In reality creativity is a hard thing to define as a specific reproducible item.
Doesn’t help that creativity is different things to different people.
You see creativity can be related to the newer western principle of making products, building things for a purpose, the expression of scientific or technological innovation. Where as in older cultures, there has always been an undertone for creativity being more for personal fulfilment, private goal setting, the taking of an inner journey.
I was talking to the local UPA Perth chapter (in formation) about aspects of UX visualisation. It was an interesting topic that brought up a good number of discussion points.
One point was on the design process. The way we design. The way that we just don’t allow ourselves time to fail at the design. Or if we do, it is hidden in the back room so we can appear to be “magical design wizards” that produce the perfect product, interface design, IA or the like.
I have been involved with many user surveys over the years. Some have gone well. Some have been a complete waste of time and effort. The main distinction between them is the surveys that were professionally developed and pretested would succeed. The ones that had been knocked together by a well meaning manager were often destined to failure.
It comes down to this – unless you have experience designing surveys, then it’s best to either hire someone who has had experience and training, or find another way to collect the same information.
Gary Barber
I'm an independent User Experience Designer. I design and enhance complete web user experiences (websites), usable web interfaces, build web architectures, prototypes, conduct usability & accessibility tests or audits.
I just make your websites better than they are.
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