SIP Day 52, wearing a striped cotton tank and black linen joggers, writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.
It’s the last week of the semester. We will spend this weeks’ classes getting closure on many of the big ideas that we’ve worked with throughout the semester as well as having the student groups get peer feedback on the final draft of the their Final Projects. It’s a time of many endings.
I have also been taking a class this semester, in User Experience Design. I thought it would be wise for me to have more background in this area due to the fact that I am working with software interfaces all day long. Though many come “out of the box” and we don’t have control over the design, we can control customize some elements of the software experience, and of course we can control how we do outreach and training on the software. Most of what I learned this semester has underscored to me that users have very idiosyncratic ways of approaching new tools based on past behavior and that it’s important to take that into account. I also had my own “user experience” this weekend by playing around with a new to me application: TikTok. I learned a lot from “fiddling” around with it and am getting some ideas about how I would like to create some content for my little homestead garden for the platform.
Bonus: so much kawaii on Tiktok: I am especially loving the goat, calf, and piglet videos.