Week 2

1. Embracing Complexity

• Embrace complexity by including new ways of thinking about design.
• The Powerful Now is an example of a project between IDEO and SYPartners that is taking on bigger challenges by trying to redefine the experience of aging.
• “Group-facilitation techniques are becoming required skills to help teams solve complex problems.” User experience designers need collaborators and must learn how to engage with them effectively.

• Design is becoming more of a compromise between classical design, design thinking, and computational design.
• UX designers are still getting hired for experience design, but the definition of experience is gaining a broader definition.
• AirBNB’s cofounder suggests that they look and try to solve their problems through a design lens. Their goal was to design a system to gain their consumer’s trust.

3. Designing Organizations and Processes

• New ways of thinking and working demand that UX designers “re-imagine how teams and organizations collaborate in support of new endeavors.”
• Companies are experimenting with new ways to organize work and have employees think in a more holistic manner.
• “Increasingly, today’s leaders, coaches, and UX designers are confronting the challenges of helping organizations to adopt new ways of working.”

Referenced Links

Learning About SmallTalk

What can we learn from this letter about the user experience?
It was understanding the most basic functions of technology that was so complex and mesmerizing to learn about when interacting with the beginning forms of what we use today. It was a simple process of learning how to rotate an object and move with across the screen with a tool that we now refer to as a mouse.

How extendable was this system?
The original intention of the product was to have people interact with the shape they were using to create different things. In the letter, she shows how she would tilt and rotate and resize the squares she was using. These basic functions become extendable in the form of a paintbrush. She make the process of utilizing the same easier by using this mouse that she was taught to use and replicating the shape as she moved the mouse. This allowed her the free form to pain or write like she would with a pen or paint brush. This could later on evolve into a paint program by utilizing tools like color, stroke, texture, etc.

Can you highlight the points in which the user was on–boarded?
She was onboarded when she began to learn about the program. In the letter, she described step by step of what she was taught with the program. She learned how to tilt the shape and how to drag it around the screen using a mouse. The learning process was very hands on as she had an instructor with her in the room that taught her how to use the program.