MKT4720 Product Experience Management

This was a 4K module that I took to clear my marketing specialization. In fact, I bidded for this module bc I heard from a senior that we get to fold paper aeroplanes in class (AHAHAHHAHAHAHA+ its true yall) and managed to drag my friend to take the same class tgt LOOOL. Prof Guo Lei was really nice, and though the content can get really dry, theres interesting Design Thinking Workshop almost every week, so we get to do a lot of hands-on activities (flying paper aeroplane was one of them AHAHHAA).

Grading components are as follows:

1. Quiz (2×10%)

Just 10 questions: involving a mix of MCQ, T/F, Problem Solving (Matching) questions done on LumiNUS. Open-book, but tbh didn’t even need to refer to notes because whatever was asked in the quiz was not found in the lecture notes. 🤡 A lot of application questions, and a lot of the concepts that were briefly mentioned by Prof in class, but were not explicitly written in the notes, were actually tested. So one must actually pay attention in class, and actively take down notes cuz thats the part that will be tested. A good thing about this module is that there is no textbook, or readings every week, so to prepare for class, one just gotta read her notes 😀

2. Individual Assignment (20%)

For this component, we were supposed to choose 3 examples of human-centred product experience design in our daily lives, which can be a physical product, digital product, or even some services. Prof didn’t really restrict us in the examples, but encouraged us to explore more novel examples (aka she was sick of Spotify, but liked examples such as mahjong table haha).

This was a max 10-page paper, and we were supposed to describe the product that we have chosen according to the Design Principles (and whether it follows the Learnable, Memorable, Error-Free, Efficient, Engaging) to evaluate the product design. We were supposed to put pictures of the product (+ even better if it shows us using it??), so I literally spammed more than 10 pages of pictures in the appendix.

Wasn’t really sure how well I scored, but I probably didn’t do well because my examples were rather common (gg, yes I am one of the many who wrote Spotify yikes)

3. Team Project (Part 1 20%, Part II 30%)

For the first part of the project, it involves a Campus Experience Design.

This project was focused on NUS, and we were supposed to identify a target group in the NUS community: e.g. international students, freshmen, visitors. For Part I, it was rather simple as we just needed to conduct primary research (in the form of interviews, contextual inquiry, Field observation) to understand their experience. Through which, we had to gather pain points from the field and discover if there were any unmet needs. For the mini presentation (it was on zoom), we had to draft out a design persona and 2-3 customer journey mapping.

I think the bulk of the work for Part I was just doing the field observation and the presentation slides, so my team managed to get this pretty done quickly (albeit quite last minute in one week lol). During the presentation, we were supposed to identify the relevant pain points of our target user group (and wayfinding around NUS was raised up by more than half the groups oof so there were many groups who were exploring the same topic).

For Part 2, this happened after recess week. We received some feedback from the prof, and thereafter worked on designing a functioning physical or digital prototype for our target user to enhance their campus experience by tackling the pain point raised in Project Part I. We were required to have 2 prototype (either a low/mid fidelity prototype, which can be handwritten (drawn), or use digital wireframes, as well as a final HIGH fidelity prototype – which she suggests using WIX, Adobe XD, Photoshop, Figma, any other 3D modelling software, or a physical prototype). We also needed to get user testings analysis (basically letting our target audience try out both the prototypes and get relevant feedback), so we needed to quickly churn out the prototypes for testing so as to improve our product design for submission. Thankfully, there was no written report, and we just had to submit supporting documents (for the user testing), links to the prototype (digital – if any), and also do up the presentation slides.

I think Part 2 was the toughest part of the project, cuz not many people knew how to design a high-fidelity prototype using a software, and I ended up tanking the high-fidelity prototype and had to design a website on WIX and Vectary…. (shag). NGL, I got a bit triggered at some of my groupmates for not pulling their weight in the project, cuz some don’t even bother attending our internal group meetings, or get their user testing report done (how hard can this be sia…) So I just ended up peer evaluating them hmph. 😤

4. Class Participation (10%)

Comprises of attendance, case study discussion and LumiNUS Forum Discussions. Prof doesn’t really ask a lot of questions in class, so I guess class participation marks mostly comes from the case study discussions (in the form of Design Thinking Workshops – where we gather in teams and take part in some hands-on activity) and LumiNUS Forum Discussions (honestly, nb really posted).

For the Design Thinking Workshop:

Basically, Prof will allocate the last 1 hour of the class for us to get into our group project teams, and we work on some activities relating to the lecture content. Etc, in one class, we were told to create a customer journey mapping and persona according to a specific scenario. Etc, in another class we were told to build 3 paper aeroplanes, and we even had a challenge to see how many of them can fly more than 2m looool. (that was fun)

Conclusion:

TLDR, there are fun components of this module (design thinking workshops), content can be sometimes dry but at least Prof is really nice (we get Ferrero chocos in some weeks and shes super chill and easy to talk to), project can be really TOUGH if you/your groupmates don’t know how to use softwares (but aiya, u can always learn 🙂 , best to just form groups with people who know how to do it… ), and this was not mentioned above, but we got a chance to explore softwares, such as Orange Data Mining (wasn’t tested but cool to know)!! Perhaps due to my bad project experience, the fun aspects of the module was diminished LOL bc I was just stressing about the project prototype after recess week zzzzz. I would prob recommend taking this module but finding good groupmates :’)

*Blog is unedited 🙂 Pardon any mistakes

Others

Lecturer/Tutor: Prof Guo Lei

Readings: NIL, some readings can be found on the course syllabus, but I have personally not read any of them.

Content: Can be rather dry… But i guess there’s some useful concepts etc Agile Thinking

Recommend?: On the fence for this… I don’t really like the content and the project component (the latter is q tough cuz we need to make a working prototype, feels like PW 2.0). But the class and prof is v chill.

voez

1/12/22