Page 69 - Eve McCabe

DESIGN FUTURES

REFLECTION

I found it very difficult to narrow down or prioritise an original issue to base the project around. As the brief was so open. Once
I did find the issue, surrounding readmissions to acute hospital care, the physical project was hard to come by. A lot of the
issues was around the service suppliers and users interactions, and therefore lack of. I finally based the project in a real-life

situation where a family member had been discharged from hospital. Getting this first hand insist (from an expert user) really
helped to get a user journey and see the pinch points of the experience.

This project, based in healthcare, was very personal to users that I spoke to. So I structured my interviews as a very open
conversation as not to dismiss or neglect the users thoughts. It worked out very well in the sense the user went straight to the
insecurities the experience had given them. My leaderships skills that I had wanted to improve from the last time project did
not improve, however I did not want to overwhelm the user in this case with many pointed questions.

I stayed focused on the main insecurity raised and was able to focus research and development. However, I did not get to
develop my project with 3D iterations because I spent so long on the initial research.

Decision making with this project came from a lot of online data bases and product reviews from competitor products.
Having a physical product to dissect in the Redesign Project really helped to understand the space envelope and the users
experience. I really missed that in this project, especially with this project and the device having very specific requirements. I
will try to source or borrow similar products to research in future projects.

Choosing concepts by myself again was tricky. I need to make sure to get multiple users to make sure the key issue areas I
developed into was a priority for my participant, and not my assumption. The form of this project came from benchmarking
other products in the market and I regret not allocating time to user test different forms and not just ask opinions. For the future

I need to make sure to fully develop out the form potential a product has, first hand with 3D models as well as with
benchmarking competitor products. This will strengthen the solution set found and have the decisions mased in evidence.

Talking to a participant with first-hand experience with the situation is so insightful. I will be continuing to find ‘expert users’ to
gather invaluable information. However, using family members as this person can cloud your leadership and possibly derail

the structure to an interview.

I liked my sketches for this project, they came naturally as I used a lot of reference images, not having 3D sketch models to go

off of like in the Redesign Project. In the future I would like to hand render my sketches. In the projects this year it was very in-
timidating to use marker because I have gotten used to the comfort of being able to make mistakes with photoshop
rendering. It would bring a lot more dynamic to the sketches immediately and I will definitely bring that into next year.

I really liked the visuals I created for the marketing part of this project. I find it hard to put statistics and words into graphics and

have it pleasing to view.