Final Project Post

The User Experience Design final project brought student’s through the design phase in order to develop an interactive product. The project allowed students to apply design methodologies learned in class and even experiment with their own techniques. User Experience Design is not an exact science and there are many ways to go about it. Sometimes, it simply takes common sense to come up with a good design.

The goal of our project was to teach financial responsibility to people, a need that was identified in the beginning of our project. This is a very realistic need and something we felt that we could address. Our original need revolved heavily around building credit for youth, however after receiving feedback from the class, it was discovered that this wasn’t a big concern amongst Singaporeans, who were our target user.

In order to address the solution effectively, it was important to research our target users which we identified as youth. While even adults are affected by lack of financial knowledge, the problem stems from teaching poor habits at a young age. By creating a solution that targeted children, the problem would be solved in the long run. An issue for our group was the apparent lack of knowledge of Singapore culture. Being from Canada, we did not fully understand how Singaporeans felt about this issue, to add to that, we did not have many local friends to ask. In order to get a better understanding of our users, we interviewed as many locals as possible to get their feelings on the need and how it could be addressed. This process helped us brainstorm solutions and identify the most effective ones. Most of our respondents felt that some form of internet solution would have been the most useful.

At this point we had decided to build an educational website which taught students through interactive lessons. However, after further feedback of our Information Architecture and concept, it was decided that we needed to do a little more to give young people incentives for use. From this feedback, we decided to present the teachings in an interactive online game format which focused on providing a fun experience while subtly teaching young people.

Our first low-fidelity prototype presented a role playing game which took users through a storyline with interactive questions which would affect the outcome of the game. This concept was developed as a paper prototype and presented to some of our users. From this feedback, it was decided that the game needed to take an even more passive approach to teaching and provide more incentive for users to continue to play.

The high fidelity prototype further improved upon our concept by offering a Jeopardy type game which was based on the concept of a multi-player game show. Users would be quizzed on financial based questions with the goal of beating their opponents. This competitive aspect added a lot more depth to the experience as users really got into the game.

Our final design brought users from the main page through to the in-game experience of just one of the games that would be offered in the final design. This allowed us to test the experience we had created to some extent. This allowed us to evaluate our design and determine where the design could be further improved. The overall feedback of our website was positive. However, I do think that improvements could be made to the overall presentation of the website in the completed design. Also, given the skills of our group, we were not able to create the best experience. If the website had been created using flash we would have been able to create a more entertaining experience. Given the feedback we received, it did seem like our product had potential to address the need.