IXD 303 is titled Designing User Experiences, which I found to be a vague module title, so going onto the module, I didn’t have much of an idea of what lectures and tasks we would be undertaking as part of the module. During the first class, which I was at home for thanks to a Translink strike, we were introduced to the deliverable for this module, a product related to healthcare, that was all we got, as for this module it was up to us to develop our own more specific brief. This was a challenge but also an opportunity and after some initial research and discussing some of my ideas, I decided on a tablet app that could help people arriving in the UK as asylum seekers. As most of these people will arrive in the UK with nothing an app for them would not be of any use, so I decided to create an app that could be used by the people who first meet them, be they volunteers, border force staff or even police. As this module required me to develop a healthcare-related app, I wanted my app to guide volunteers or others through how to ask the right questions to ascertain what healthcare needs people may have. Further research indicated that to do this there would need to be a way of facilitating communication between the volunteer and the asylum seeker. As asylum seekers are required to request asylum on entering the UK, it also made sense to add a way of collecting a person’s details to assist them in doing this. With three tasks that my app needed to be able to tackle, I had set myself a challenge, however, it was a challenge I relished. After seeing so many news stories showing the issues asylum seekers faced, it was good to look deeper into these issues and see what was happening behind the media and political noise. As I moved through the project by having to work on the three tasks, I could look deeper at translation software and healthcare software. This variety of interesting research made this a project I enjoyed, I could have spent twice as much time on research and still have been learning new things. This project has kept me interested and challenged throughout the semester and for me this is key, I also enjoyed having the full semester dedicated to one project as it allowed me to do deeper research and immerse myself in the issue I was trying to tackle.

While the main deliverable project was great, I also got a lot from this semester’s classes. We took part in several group-based class projects, which I really enjoyed, all of the people I have spoken with have talked about collaborating as a designer and being part of a team, however, up until now this is not something we have done a lot of with our main deliverables being solo projects. It was great to do more group work and working with others who look at things differently as well as bringing different skills to the group was hugely beneficial. Another topic we looked at was Service Design, where you look beyond the frontstage aspects of UX design into the whole process and people behind a service. This appeals to me as I always like to look at the bigger picture and get an in-depth understanding of a problem before trying to tackle it. Service Design allows me to look at the overall picture before narrowing my focus to take on an opportunity for improvement I will have discovered during the process. I will be looking further into Service Design to see if designing a service may provide my final year project. I did have some frustrations this semester, the main one being the explainer videos I had hoped to create to add to my app. I had started out with great intentions, creating storyboards for the videos in preparation for their creation. However, as time went on, I realised I would not have the time to create the animated explainers I had planned. I hoped that a new AI tool that turns text prompts into video would provide an answer, however, the results were poor, with lots of glitches. The glitches were noticeable before I even tried to engineer a prompt to get the style of video I needed. I had to give up and create a video using stock footage and some captions I added in After Effects to at least show where and how I envisaged the video to be in my app. This was frustrating, however, if I was developing the app for use, I would hire the services of an animator to create the explainers to my specifications and storyboards.

Overall, I have really enjoyed this module, I have learnt a lot of skills both industry-specific and soft skills such as working on a design task as a team. I feel as if this module has stood me in good stead as I move on to placement for the next year.