Week 8

We had a lecture on an organisation called S.K.I.P that specialises in creating solutions for issues relating to physical punishment of children. She mainly talked about using design revolution as an innovation instead of a tool for process and money, and also how the element of design can change the community. The initiative was based on the assumption that all parents love their children but other factors such as depression, stress, alcohol etc has cause them to act otherwise. Instead of focusing on recusing these children, S.K.I.P aimed to help the kids by helping the parents. Through the use of empathy, they come to understand the community by reaching out to their audience and forming a connection and trust bond with them. They also were able to get volunteers who had a similar experience to reach out to these people. She found that going out and creating these connections with her audience has changed the perspective that she initially had. She also worked with her audience to come up with an application targeted to hidden families that may not reach out to them because they are embarrassed or feels ashamed. I think I should use empathy to understand my target audience more and this might mean that my target audience can have a role in designing my prototype. Understanding what they need/want, generating new ideas that I haven't thought of as we are in different positions. I think that letting my target audience design my app will really let me learn about them in a entirely different aspect. 

We had another user-testing session in class. We joined a different group and explained what our app does and who it caters for, also a brief explanation about the scenario before the user downloads the app. After discussion, our user-testers believe that our app was too busy and had too many things going on. They suggest that we really narrow down our idea, possibly focusing on one aspect of our current app, and doing it really well. Instead of focusing on Massey students, we were suggested to only cater for first year students as they will be the ones really using the components of the app. We then presented our idea to the tutor and he believe that we should come up with 3 words that explains what our audiences needs/be interested in our app. We need to think about how we are going to capture the attention of our audiences, how are we going to persuade them to use our app? I think we should consider the importance of empathy and really trying to understand how students will look and use our app. This is something our group can look into further.