THE UX OF FINAL MAJOR PROJECT | BLOG 04

New Design Brief

14/07/21 – 25/11/21 (about 3 months - excluding summer holidays)

Design Brief: Design a dynamic way to storytell Blockchain (Crytocoins) to help the beginners to get started in a friendly way and understanding the complexity.

Project Member: Yiwei(David) Han, Sue Heeyeon An.

Design Phase

Tutorial with Eva

In the tutorial, I told Eva about the challenges we've encountered so far and the two new ideas we've come up with. She thinks it's a good thing that ideas are being challenged. Her suggestion is that environmental impact should not be a reason to oppose blockchain, but that's not to say we shouldn't think about it or look at it from a bigger perspective. Perhaps we should think about how to let people make better-informed decisions when they use blockchain, and that's exactly what we could do.

Tutorial with Eva & Concept of Meta-Narrative (Courtesy of David).

Jonathan Harris — The Whale Hunt (Courtesy of David).

Select a different category - The Whale Hunt (Courtesy of David).

She recommended an interactive storytelling work from Jonathan Harris, as a reference for us and thought we could also think about adopting a meta-narrative approach to combine both of our ideas together. Although our two ideas may appear to be two poles, they are in fact the same story viewed on a different scale and from a different perspective. It's not against or for cryptocurrency or blockchain, it's not black and white. Rather, it's a dynamic range that allows people to choose the scale they need.

New Design Brief - A combination of complexity and simplicity

Our new brief (Made by Group).

Based on Eva's suggestions, we reorganised our ideas and solidify our research questions, target groups and design output formats to produce a new design concept brief. I also created a simple slider control prototype to visualise our concept.
Simplicity: Improve/simplify the complex process of buying cryptocurrency.
Complexity: Showcase the invisible impact of the above actions and reveal the underlying operational processes that accomplish them.

Slider demonstration for changing the scope of complexity (Made by David).

Relevant interactive work that can change the range of complexity (Courtesy of David).

Feedback Session

We showed this new concept to our tutors and they raised some valuable concerns. Alaistair and Tiffany suggested that we should filter and narrow down the design a bit more (e.g., specifically which cryptocurrency to buy, which platform, what complexity is primarily demonstrated and why). They were also concerned about whether we could do both at the same time, suggesting that we should perhaps focus on how to demonstrate complexity rather than actually improving a particular purchase process.  John also pointed out how we could ensure that we didn't oversimplify the level of sophistication in Blockchain system.

All of these suggestions were very helpful and I agree that we shouldn't be overly concerned with optimising the process of buying cryptocurrency, but rather using that buying process as a "springboard" to tell a bigger story. So we decided to focus on researching and gathering the underlying sophisticated operations of the blockchain.

Reference

Harris, J. (2007). The Whale Hunt / by Jonathan Harris / Statement. [online] thewhalehunt.org. Available at: http://thewhalehunt.org/statement.html [Accessed 13 Oct. 2021].

New World Encyclopedia (2020). Metanarrative - New World Encyclopedia. [online] Newworldencyclopedia.org. Available at: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Metanarrative.