Week 4 @ KSU's UXD Program

The major takeaway this week was the idea of responsiveness. Humans need interaction and feedback to make decisions, form opinions, or in general live everyday life. I applied the responsive analogy to my work while troubleshooting bugs this past week. Prior to this, my routine was to read the email about the problem and begin troubleshooting immediately. But after the readings I decided to be more "responsive" by acknowledging to the reporter that I was looking into the issue and notifying my teammates of the status and ticket number for tracking purposes. Although I haven't received feedback on this change of behavior, I did put myself in the other people's shoes and realized that this type of responsiveness should be encouraged because of how calming and informative it from a user's perspective.

This week's assignment really pushed me as far as knowing if I should be in the field of User Design. I've been in the field of process improvement for years and work flows and and process designs are my bread and butter, but this assignment made me think of the process as a human and not as a system. What did I find out about myself? I love it, but I need to improve! I am still thinking in a far too detailed manner with efficiency at the forefront of my concern, not the experience of the user. An example would be the confirmation email you get when booking a flight, it's not needed, it's an extra step, but the consumer would benefit from this in most cases.  I also need to start thinking high level at the beginning of my work and work my way down to the details when it's necessary. Adding on to that point, I need to iterate and re-iterate, but not sure how best to build that as a habit.