Master | Course | Sep ’21 – Nov ’22
UX Design
Department
Innovation
Management
Given by
Wijnand IJsselsteijn
Wolmet Barendregt
Team
Joëlle van Beers
Waleed Mahmood
Daphne Debije
IN SHORT
The course provided theoretical background on human experiences mediated by interactive technologies as well as practical, hands-on experience with designing and assessing interactive systems in this respect. User Experience (UX) Design is about understanding people in order to design interactive systems in a way that fits people’s needs, wishes, abilities, and habits. We need to ascertain ourselves that the artefacts we design meet a broad set of human-centred requirements. These include utility and usability, but also hedonic factors and human values.
Since the problems caused by loneliness are quite severe, and since the rate of loneliness is high among students (35%), it is of high priority that a solution is sought for this group of people to bring the frequency of the feelings of loneliness down. Therefore, the goal of this project was to find a solution to lower the feelings of loneliness among students in the form of a newly designed piece of technology that can fulfil the need for social connectedness and reduce the perceived social isolation of students, which lead to the research question of: “How to reduce the feeling of loneliness among students ”.
LEARNINGS
During the first weeks of this course, I have gained a better understanding of the theoretical aspects behind thematic analysis and the affinity diagram, and how to choose between them depending on the goal of the design challenge.
Actually creating the affinity diagram made me reflect on the clusters that we had created and whether they actually met the coding or that they were clusters because we saw them that way in our heads.
