J term in review
I have never had the opportunity to take a class that involved working with a patient before, and working with our patient made me realize that in patient centered design, while form follows function, form also contributes to function. A user might consider one form more inviting than another and be more inclined to use that form of a product through the incorporation of personalization and positive reinforcement in the design. Over this past week, unfortunately we realized the feasibility of our project was outside of the scope of this course so we instead worked on prototyping our final product and defining the functionality. Although I originally saw the unfeasibility of using swift, a coding language, as a setback, I now see that prototyping without swift is far more liberating due. Consequently, not only did we put far more thought into the patient’s specifications and needs this way but we also circumvented the inherent constraints of using a programming language and focused more on the design process itself (which for an app, as we learned, it quite intensive). Not only are there an innumerable number of laws out there that demonstrate the relationships between certain aspects of apps and its usability and appeal ranging from Fitt’s law to the psychology behind color schemes, there is also a lot to consider from the user’s pov: the color scheme, the physical layout of graphs, buttons and menus, the way the settings are laid out and the ease of use. Our design process tended to be chaotic and at times, especially given the time limits that come with j term and there were clashes here and there, but I’m happy that our patient liked our final prototype and I plan on working with my group members in the future to try to create a version that she could use. Overall, for all of the groups for the patient centered project, I found that the group with the giant timeline really stood out to me since their presentation really went into detail with regards to their design process and really immersed us with their patient’s issues and perspectives, their research, their creative process and their design process.
For J term in review in general, I really appreciated the opportunities to use multiple visual media to express our perspectives from an artistic and design standpoint. I especially enjoyed the case studies discussions in class since they exposed us to the regulation and business viewpoints that come with product design.
BME Design 