User Experience

The User Experience: Theory and Practice course is my chosen track course and thus my entry into the RDD track. The course gave me a fundamental understanding of user engagement with a focus on designing intuitive, meaningful and habit-forming interactions. Parts of this course were driven by an assignment where we created a UX manifesto. We explored behavioral models such as the Hooked Model and how it can be applied to support deeper user engagement. Through universally applicable concepts such as triggers, actions, rewards and investments, we examined how design can influence user behavior and long-term engagement.

During the course, we created a speculative application concept that was designed to support positive habits through intentional UX design. This project taught me to critically evaluate user attention spans and implement methods to balance functionality and emotional appeal. The process of doing this requires ethical discussion and consideration of which engagement strategies can be used to incorporate restrictions on socially beneficial goals in commercial applications such as social media.

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This course especially shaped my approach and understanding of UX and contributed a lot to my perception of U&S. I learned how to create designs that are consistent with user needs and behavior. C&A was supported in this course by the focused empathy on creating interfaces with functional and visually engaging qualities. These insights into the field of user interaction and behavioral modeling have informed my approach to designing meaningful interactions, although I rarely refer to human behavior in my projects.