Week 4
I've been terrible at posting reflections on here lately, but I've kept my reflections on paper so it's not that I've neglected this task entirely. I've just been extremely busy and this Friday my cold reached it's peak of terribleness. No corona though, so that's good.
After week 3 I was able to help Tony some more with current tasks that he had on his plate, and it felt very valuable to be able to contribute with "real" work. Of course, everything I do on my internship is real work, but this type of work I was able to contribute with now was more urgent and towards a strict deadline. It needed to be done. The work I'm doing otherwise during my internship is more visionary and will help Axis UX a bit further on, in the future.
During the work I contributed with along with Tony that was the more urgent work task, I ran into multiple problems common in big companies like Axis. A bunch of technical issues arose as I came up with ideas of solutions. It was frustrating at times but a really good lesson as well. As UX designers in a hardware and engineer focused company, we need to be able to skillfully compromise. Both designers and engineers have a lot to learn from each other, and only together we'll create the best solutions. The issues I was confronted with, without saying too much, involved inconsistency issues through the developer teams using different types of API depending on wether they were developers of the big windows native system or the web-based plug in. This makes it difficult, maybe even impossible, to make the visuals exactly the same, since they don't share the same coding language. As designers in that position we have to be creative and make the best of what we have. What me and Tony came up with during this week was a quick fix, but it was valuable to me to contribute in a sharp context where we needed something to be done fast, and I also took on the documentation of this and some future ideas of how it should be done when a re-design is due. I got the opportunity to present the solutions to colleagues and stakeholders, both product owner and web developers. As I presented the important contributions to the product owner I also saw the opportunity to present some ideas of future visions for a specific feature of the system. To do this I used Adobe XD to mock up my ideas to make them visual, and it went really well. The product owner thought I was completely in line with their visions, and this made me feel really happy with how far I've come in understanding the workplace and their visions with the system I'm working in. Through working so closely with Tony which has a lot of competence in both interaction design (through being a teacher of interaction design in Malmö for 10+ years) and UX design I learn so much every day and the way I'm able to apply the knowledge onto real contributions is very empowering for me.
This week I also started the work of trying to get in contact with users, test sites and other people that has experience of access control systems. This is a typical example of what I do that will help Axis in the long run, but it's not contributing to a current project or product. To get the most of this user research I prepared some interview questions and thought through what I wanted to get out of the interviews I will hold and the physical meetings I will conduct. This could be questions like "how do you experience x in the system" "how would you like y to behave if you could have it your way?". To dig a bit deeper into how they actually experience the product and what needs we need to meet with our products moving forward. It's interesting to plan for user research, especially now when I am representing Axis as I'm doing it. It's important to give a good impression, and invoke the users to open up and discuss the product with me, without judging their feedback nor promising them anything.
After speaking to users (both of our system and different systems) I'm on my way to pin pointing similarities and differences of different types of users of access control systems. I will continue this pin pointing through making user journeys. My aim is to pin point what feels "safe" to use and what makes a product feel unreliable. This is a key point of access control systems, and important experience to nail in order to create a successful access control system.
Another task I have been tackling this week is to finish off a UX audit of one feature of the access control system that we're working with. This audit is to make Tony's work a bit easier, or less heavy at least. He has made an audit himself, but asked me to make one as well so he has two perspectives on the matter. It was a fun task that really encouraged me to put on my skeptical glasses and criticize the current version of the feature. The audit resulted in a checklist of improvements that I see need to be done, and I hope it will be beneficial for Tony when he needs to attack the re-design of the feature. For this task I also got a lot of help from a QA colleague, Haris. He's very easy to talk to and discuss things with, and since he has done quality assurance of this feature he also had his own ideas of what needs to be improved and fixed. We had a good discussion of different aspects of the feature and unlocked deeper findings through brainstorming improvements together. To me it's super valuable to discuss a feature, issues, improvements and design out loud with someone else, because not only do I get their knowledge and ideas, I also unlock further ideas and thoughts within myself as I discuss. As valuable it is to discuss with fellow UX designers, I also believe it's important to broaden the perspectives and include colleagues with different roles for cross-disciplinary discussions. I saw this post that reminded me of the importance of different perspectives:
As a designer I will focus on how the user will experience the improved feature, while Haris (QA) will focus on how the improved feature can be built better. For me, this resulted in a fruitful discussion including both perspectives of problem solving and design thinking.
