Reflective Journaling: Week 3

Wow! What a week! Don Norman's chapters, especially when he goes into discussing how the concept of passwords and how users interact with them is not a good experience. I had never really thought about the idea behind passwords until Norman dove deeper into explaining their flaws. The example that he gave about how a lady put all of her passwords under an alias name in her phone and how the hacker said that is one of the first places they would go to find a persons password boggled my mind! I thought this idea of passwords and how they are set up to protect us and be secure, but since we as users use them incorrectly, they fail us was so interesting that I tried to loop it into as many conversations I was having this week with the people around me. This conversation and the fact that passwords and the way people use them sparked some pretty interesting discussions that really made me and the people I was talking to think. Coincidentally, my work does these bathroom publications called "The Toilet Paper" and they showed which types of passwords are the easiest and hardest for a computer to exploit. How crazy!

I also really enjoyed doing the redesign assignment this week. Even though the dialog box and the prompt were pretty simple, based on all of the things I have learned thus far, and based on some of my prior knowledge, I was able to get so much out of this assignment. As I was initially taking notes on the original dialog box, I kept finding myself asking "well what if this happened", "but I'm missing this piece of the puzzle", "if only the prompt said this too", which really opened my eyes to just how much I have grown in such a short amount of time. My thinking as a UXer has increased and my awareness of what is good or bad design is now not only a "gut" feeling, but it is something I am able to back up with sound reasoning and explanation. This is so exciting! I cannot wait to continue learning and growing.