Check-In: Takeaways

So far in the workshops done for the class in development I feel as though there’s been a problem in clarity in instruction – i.e. the intent or goal of them either seeming to change as we progressed or reaching the final stages and realizing we did things “wrong,” by the end. Some very clear and very concise instructions would go a long way. I understand the need to not be rigid as to allow for exploration of ideas, but having a base of clear guidelines to follow, I feel, would allow more thinking/time to be devoted to developing an evolving idea as opposed to needing to make adjustments on the fly.
Additionally, as far as group dynamics go it feels a bit rigid and almost too bifurcated. Again going to the accidentally doing things “wrong” way in that our groups of 2 congregating in other groups of 2 seems to subdivide and bifurcate the design process. I feel just allowing the groups to function of units of 4 or 3 allowed for much more organic conversations and insights to happen. Also the dynamic of having your own conversation directly next to 2 people also having a conversation feels very disorienting. This, I’m guessing, may be a design/dev strategy used to brainstorm and develop ideas but here it seems a little convoluted for the purposes of what we’ve been doing in terms of the group dynamic – also Google is by no means a perfect company for team camaraderie.

That being said, I liked everything else though. Despite being awful at drawing, the approach to sort of storyboarding concepts or ideas in rapid fire succession, doing critique/feedback and narrowing down the ideas seems like a recipe for good idea and concept development. It just seems a little encumbered by process and procedure to get there in a way that works for a classroom setting. There’s a lot of analog between UX and the classroom experience though, so I imagine they may take shape in meaningful and helpful ways as the semester goes on.