Female X Coders Final Review Part 1

For the first project of User experience, we were required to research a sub-culture. The depth of research that we gathered was more than I could imagine. When first starting the project I was unsure about how this related to design, by the end of the project I could not think of one reason it was not related to design. Through this project, I began to understand that the best designers go beyond form and involve themselves in the project they are working on. I did not go to the lecture, but I remember people talking about the designer for the Girl Scouts and how he had to interview the mom's and girls to understand what the next step was into doing the logo, but really he re-branded it. Although we have not taken the next step to create a solution, we have taken the first step. When someone says "research" the first image that comes to my mind is the internet and a library. I was surprised with the little information we had on the female tech "geeks", and how much we gained from the three different types of research. By getting involved in their lives made more of a well rounded pool of data. After pulling all the analog data together, we decided to even further narrow the specification and decided on female coders. It was an interesting process to go out and get a tour from someone and find out that our secondary data was false or exaggerated. By the end of getting into the field research I definitely had a different light on what can be considered research. I do realize that the research that I do for a paper is not the same that I would need for designing, but I think I was surprised with the amount of depth that we were able to achieve. The stereotype is that these women are isolated within their own technology world, but in reality are very sociable. Some of this is probably due to the impact of social networking, but still a fundamental value we found in the sub culture.

In this project we were working in teams. I believe this to have helped our research. Yes two or three minds are better than one, but it was the point of views that helped to make our content stronger. For example after interviewing Erika, Karen and I were discussing her leave behind, and we noticed different qualities about Erika that ended up being patterns within the other resources. Working in a team, and having a subject that depends on a team was an interesting twist too. To me this was a great way to look at collaboration and how to work within a group.

The style of the book relfected the visuals of coding. Using two different typefaces that also reflected a computer.

Here are some of the revisions that I made for the visual audit. The idea was to be a reference to the online web. However after several revisions of trying to fit the "openness" in the book, it was not cohesive with the rest of the book.