 Hi everyone, now for something very very serious, how do you act with memes? Let me tell you a bit about myself, my name is Mindy and for my undergrad degree I majored in communications with a minor in psychology and after a short stint in media publishing I went on to do a post-grad at industrial design, somewhere in Europe I worked in a Japanese design studio for a bit, came home to Singapore and found myself somehow working in a startup and then I continued on to work for several other startups and then the rest as they say is history but that still doesn't really answer one question that's probably in everyone's minds What exactly do I do? What do I really do? Okay, so to explain what I do and being a UX designer I found this really effective UX tool that I would show you right now It's the what do I really do meme So here's what my friends think I do, because I freelance for a little bit So everyone has this idea of designers, they all work flexible hours and they can work from home, from their bed, in their pajamas which is kind of true sometimes My mom doesn't really completely understand what I do My colleagues, some of them are here today but I won't name names So we use a lot of post-its in trying to sort out our insights and stuff so this is probably their picture of what I do at work And then if you google for things about design since there's so many branches and forms of design and also many many competing and conflicting ideas of what UX really is Yeah, that's one of the ideas For myself, the best part that I enjoy the most about what I do is the part where I get to sketch ideas out and refine wireframes and the flow of text and our digital products So this is the part I like the best But yeah, that still doesn't answer the question, what do I really do? Probably something like this, just the actual Yeah So congratulations, we've just created a meme about what I really do and possibly also contributed to my quarter slash mid-life crisis But what we've also done is we've also put together representations of mental models Yeah, of my job And according to different people's ideas of what they think my job is and surprise or no surprise, they are all quite different So some of you might be wondering if you haven't heard of this term before What is a mental model? This term is also kind of somewhat new to me It's a relatively new term coined in the 1940s It first appeared in a book called The Nature of Explanation by a Scottish philosopher and psychologist called Kenneth Craig So in the book he proposed the idea that the mind forms their own models of reality and then your mind uses this model to predict future events So what this means in terms of software or digital products or any kind of product really is that your user's mental model is the way that they perceive the world around them and this model isn't based on facts, it's based on their beliefs it's based on their own experience So whatever they think about any given system or interaction with your existing system product or solution it will be based on what they feel or what they perceive and it's not really based on what your actual product is or what it's supposed to be So in most cases their idea of it or their interaction of it will lead to a kind of experience that closely resembles what the product really is but not 100% accurate most of the time So why is this important? So going back to our earlier meme Here we can see that each user has their own mental model like in this case my mom has her own idea of what I do and she uses it to construct her idea of the same actual system of my job So she thinks that what I do is pretty simple and that I can do it in 5 minutes for example So every other user will have their own idea about how it's supposed to work and that will impact their own planning of how they use your product system or solution and how they predict your system will respond to them It's all based on your mental models Interestingly also within the same user group they will have different ideas of it So in this case each person has their own mental model of what I do informs what they think my job is what they decide to do about it and what they expect from me in response So yeah but enough about talking about me We can look at some other examples Here's a good example of I would say If I'm in room 105 If I come from a cultural background where I read horizontally left to right then I would probably think that room 105 is to the right but if I come from a cultural background where I read vertically I would probably think that room 105 is to my left So this is an example of how culture informs your mental model Another example of mental models at a cultural level which I won't be showing you but you can look it up on YouTube later An old classic called the Italian man who went to Malta So yeah it kind of went viral before means wedding So here's another example In urban planning there's a term called desire pass and that's what happens when pass a phone that were designed by the urban planner but it's what happens when people or animals they choose not to use the pass that the urban planner is paid for them So this is what happens So yeah back to this So where does UX come in and how does it help So when we interact constantly with all kinds of digital and physical products we are actually attempting to accomplish certain goals with them In the process we have what we call a user experience So because we all construct our own small scale model of reality in order to anticipate and explain events while using these systems and products when what we anticipate to happen does not happen and the experience does not meet or even might in some cases contradict our model of reality then it causes a feeling of psychological inconsistency that we were commonly described as having a bad user experience So why is this important again? When we design a developed product if we can understand what's going on in the user's minds and what their mental model is like then we can kind of simulate what that model is within our design so that it will meet their idea of reality it will meet their expectations and therefore you will be created a product that's more usable and intuitive So let me tell you a little bit more about UX and design thinking So this is a quote by Donald Norman who practically invented what the whole UX thing So he says that user experience encompasses all aspects of an end user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products So there are three parts that make up an experience the technology behind it, the business goals of creating the product and then the people who use it, the people who create it So science kind of helps to design and build the way it works that would be technology Business means like marketing, sales, design It will help decide like how much people should pay and how you could convince them to and then the people part, psychology or cognitive science will kind of help us to understand the way that it makes people feel So the people part is where design thinking comes in The design thinking framework helps designers, developers or everyone working on a product to gather data or evidence This will reduce the risk of making decisions that will potentially result in a negative impact on people So design thinking is an iterative process made out of three main stages The first stage, we try to understand who we're building the product for Then we'll kind of refine our ideas and then validate those things and then kind of goes in a loop like that So user research comes in an understanding part mostly the bulk of user research comes in an understanding part and it helps us to understand the user's mental models and after which we can kind of make decisions about what to do next to improve the user's experience with the product that we're building So on to understanding users This is kind of a good list of all the kinds of user research methods that exist out there There are many, many ways to conduct user research to understand user behavior, attitudes, motivations, perceptions and there's also that really fun way of measuring a user's brain for response to stimuli but these are some of the more widely practiced methods of collecting user research data User interviews and observations can help to uncover motivations and goals perceptions or emotions that are informing a user's mental model and help us to understand people and their needs This is talking more about qualitative research and then after you kind of have that then when you test your system you're kind of gathering more of the quantitative user research and then when you have the insight from that then you'll form an idea of what your goals, perceptions and emotions are and then you can use it to improve the user's experience When we are conducting user research we like to use this tool called empathy mapping It's a really helpful tool that will help you to kind of put yourself in another person's shoes and connect with how they might be feeling about the product the problem circumstance or situation for which your product is trying to solve and understanding users, their problems and the context around their situations are all important in order to design and develop the most optimal solutions And at the end of my talk, so in conclusion how do you UX with me? So we piece together user goals, perceptions and emotions to create a user-vault and intuitive solution You can force yourself to think about each person as a user They have individual goals, needs, emotions and perceptions and you can go from this to this