I completely agree that stories can be simulators for life. When reading stories, we truly are given an experience that is not our own. The best stories I have read seem like memories to me that I have experienced myself, feeling like I was the one in a fantasy world, or I was the one in a detective scene. The idea of using stories to communicate our issues and solutions would be incredibly effective in a marketing sense, and it would allow people to understand us better, and even relate to us on a deeper level.

I feel that this principle is crucial to design as a whole as it improves the success of the design by being more tailored to the community. The intentions of the designer are nice, but it is usually less relevant and could actually hurt the design. It is important to know who you are designing for so you can ensure that your design benefits the communities you are trying to reach, because if you design for yourself then you are already most likely limiting yourself to a smaller audience.

I think that a cognitive walkthrough is something that I always run through in my head when thinking of a user interface. In past classes I have used this but not quite to as a detailed extent. I would run through how the average person would see my design and if they would understand how to get from point A to point B. I think that attempting to put yourself in the users shoes and considering every outcome that could become a pain point is a very useful and easier method, especially if you are aware of the existing common designs of user journeys.

This idea is an extremely important part of user interface research. It is crucial to understand how the user will interact with your interface and the intended journey you created, but the intention should not be to test how they perform but rather how your design performed. In this way you can really focus on the pain points of your design rather than focusing on the person. As a user myself, there are always moments in a user interface where I would get stuck for a little and wonder where to go next. By testing your design, you gain insights on where these people are feeling confused and how they can achieve their goals as smoothly as possible.

I like this point because it asks the important questions about the users journey. Thinking about how the user will react to your design and predicting the possible ways they will try to interact with it is crucial to designing a good interface. When creating an interactive aspect, the interaction must be signified or intuitive because if it is not then it will completely ruin the experience and cause confusion. It shows that sometimes less content can contribute to a clearer solution, but every addition to the interface must have purpose and not lead to confusion

I really resonate with this piece because often times when creating prototypes and going through the process, you almost never use everything in that prototype. It has always been so useful for finding design flaws as you go, and it gives so many insights on how your product will be interacted with, and how you will accommodate for the missing pieces. Prototypes also often showed me that an idea which sounded so good when written out and thought about turned out to not be useful or practical to use. Prototypes and going through the process is the one of the most insightful parts of implementing a solution.

I found this example very intriguing but also it makes sense. It is intriguing to see how drastically adding a few words of context skews the results, and it just shows how important it is to take into account the education levels of the survey population. This example really made me realize that context and education holds so much power over the data you get and the analysis you make. Skipping out on crucial context or unintentionally giving biased information will yield unreliable survey data way too easily.

I completely agree that you shouldn't copy the designs in your research and I think that being inspired by solutions rather than copying is the most important aspect of competitive analyses. Whether the competitor was successful or not, there is still much insight to gain and even incorporate into your own. This has been very important to me throughout my life when coming up with ideas for anything. I believe when ideas are shared and thoroughly understood, innovation begins to shine.

I have mixed opinions on this statement. I completely agree that the more expertise someone has on a problem, the more insightful their critique can be because they understand more about what needs to be done and what can really solve the problem. However, I still think that there is meaning in critique from people without as much expertise. Mostly in a usability sense, I feel that feedback from someone without as much expertise will give you insights on how easily usable and interpretable your solution may be to the average person, which can translate to how usable it would be to your stakeholders. I can still see how it can be not as meaningful, but in a sense I think you can find meaning behind most critique no matter the expertise level.

I actually had never thought about how important of a role context plays when it comes to creativity. Before, I thought creative people could come up with something out of nothing. Now that I think about the idea of surrounding yourself with rich context, it has always played a key part in my own creativity. I did not consider that using the ideas of others and branching out as "creative" because it was inspired and not "from nothing." However, this reading made me realize that context and taking inspiration is a key element of creativity.

I completely that these goals and values need to be extracted from interviews and understood. You are able to extract a great amount of insights from interviewees but those insights are all useless unless you take the time to really understand what was important to them while they answer your questions. Seeing how many different problems you can actually extract by interviewing a couple people really shows how important the data collection process is as well, because you may miss more concerning issues if you fail to collect enough data.

I feel like this statement is incredibly important for designers to realize when they are trying to solve a problem. You can never come up a design that will address the need of every person on the planet because every individual is so different in terms of needs. This is why focusing on specific needs is more beneficial so they can get the most out of it, because a product that is designed for everyone is less effective than a product that is tailored to specific needs.

This idea of the human-centered design paradigm has stuck with me the most when I go through any design process. When I first tried to solve a problem with design, I immediately jumped a solution without thinking about who it would actually help or what it would solve, which ultimately limited my ideation stage to my own knowledge and assumptions. By taking this first step to really analyze your audience and issue, it leads you in the right direction and leads to clearer and more effective solutions.

Initially I had thought that design required more genius in creativity than problem solving skills. My perception of problem solving has been very straightforward and narrow since the first thing that comes to mind when thinking "problem solving" is automatically a math equation or a question on a paper that could be answered with a reading. However, this really brings my attention to how powerful problem solving is in design and that solving problems is what shapes our society and determines its future.