User & Society
The expertise area User & Society holds the closest to my vision. I strive towards the link between technology and society because my opinion it is missing in various cases. To be able to create this link the user has to be approached and kept in mind during the whole process. This area is very valuable to me, as the area stands for this approach and skillset.
Psychology &
Sociology
At first I explored the field of psychology and sociology through my USE learning line. Through these courses I wanted to discover whether I wanted to completely dive into the direction of the faculty of Psychology and Technology, but after the final project course it was very clear that it was too heavily focused on literature research. It was, however, interesting to explore the effects and theories about human behaviour, which could be applied to the design process.
Interest and growth
Instead I wanted to focus on the user evaluations and listening to their needs to be sure that the designs I made were truly meant for the users, and was positively received by them. Throughout the projects and various courses I got in touch with users and evaluations. From observations to interviews and evaluations to understand the user’s needs. It is something that I felt quite uncomfortable with in the beginning due to my introverted nature, but slowly gained confidence in these skills.
Teaching myself
In the first two projects it was however more experimenting on the evaluation plan than having a concrete idea on what to do. It gave decent results, but afterwards I would learn the flaws of the plan which could have been tackled before. During the research project this was different since the method and therefore the evaluation needs to really be thought through. Therefore it was better prepared and the results were better. The analysis through open coding and triangulation was therefore also better and these skills were strongly developed because of it.
Learning methods
At the end of the third year I followed the course User Evaluation Methods to properly learn the different methods that I had been using for quite some time. It was interesting and even though we could not directly interact with the user due to Covid, the results were a great success and it taught me the different methods next to new methods that I didn’t know before. I then used these newly learned skills during my FBP in which I did a questionnaire for the first time. I got a large participant group which was an excellent start for the concept’s development. Overall I definitely don’t think I executed on the skills perfectly, but I have made many small steps for an overall strong improvement.
