2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

As msu.seum becomes the primary focus of the fieldschool, I’m finding that my experiences working on the UX/UI design aspect of the project echoes back to a sentiment I expressed in an earlier blog post—the idea of situating user experience neatly within both a granular and global framework. Now that we are fully immersed in the building phase of the msu.seum project, it’s becoming very clear to me that maintaining a certain balance between these seemingly disparate ideas is tethered to the success of a product. In order to create the best user experience possible, we needed to map out processes that are veiled to the users–processes that work tandem with the surface level elements to create a smooth user interface.

Thinking about these processes and mapping out all the intricacies and mechanisms of an app was difficult for me to implement because, prior to this project, I have only been on the user-end of an application/program. Being on the inside helps me visualize how important UI can be when designing an app–something that I think parallels the goals of msu.seum. Often times, the successes of black-boxed fields aren’t valued in the same way the workers/insiders of that field value and evaluate success, and through msu.seum, we hope to give value to the work of anthropologists by highlighting their work processes that go unseen.

Striving for this balance between what is seen and what is unseen (if the “unseen” can be likened to granularity and the “seen” likened to the overarching outcomes of an app) was one of the central goals of the UX team during the preliminary stages of the process because it was at this point where the small details that go into making an app user-friendly become so integral to the overall success of a project. As we moved forward, I saw how the decisions that the UX team made also influenced the progress of the other branches of msu.seum: the programmers needed to know how the different elements of the app would interact with each other and the content people needed to know the ways in which information would be displayed and write content to fit within that structure. It is at this point where thinking about the small details would materialize into a powerful user interface.

Along with balancing granularity and global thinking, we needed to negotiate what users need for an intuitive experience and what we can actually do. When thinking about the overall effectiveness and usefulness of our app, some things we would like to incorporate are either out of reach because of the small timeframe we have or because of our technical skill level—something that more time could afford us. At this phase in the project, we need to prioritize what is viable and feasible, which might mean making some sacrifices in terms of user experience, which I think is an important distinction to be able to make in project management.