There was a lot to take in during this section of the course and I enjoyed most of it. I'll list the pros and cons as I see fit. There were only two cons, but they were HUGE CONS in my opinion, and were directly related to my only frustrations with this almost perfect course. I hope this feedback is helpful to everyone, especially those at google looking to refine this course.
Pros:
- Just when I thought I was dreading doing another usability study, I found out that all the rough edges had been smoothed during the first usability study and at this point it was all about polish. My app benefitted the most from this second usability study and was very reassuring that these can be fun all the way through the process.
- Working with Design Systems was a joy and felt like I had obtained cheat codes. Talk about a tech collage, this is it.
- Getting my Prototype to the High-Fidelity level was the boost of confidence I needed.
- Finding out how to add Movement / Animation to my prototype really took things to the next level as well. I always wondered about this part of the process.
- The level of creativity that continues through out these courses is refreshing and feeds my soul! Love it!
Cons:
- In the first couple weeks of this course I was baffled by the fact that someone at google thought it would make sense to have the mentor READING to us. I would rather see the words and read the material myself than have to sit through a slower reader. Reading the material myself would have shown me new words and their spelling. But to double down on this bizarre choice of presenting new material to students, The reading sections should have been video. Why, because we (the students) were being told how to do something in a piece of software that, not only are we unfamiliar with, but it lives on a screen and could have easily been screen recorded. Instead of telling the student where to put their mouse cursor and what objects to select by describing their shapes in an unclear way, just show us. I was lost more than a few times and if I had so much as an image, or a video, but even images would have sufficed, I would have felt much more confident in what I was doing.
- My 2nd and final complaint about this course was the Quiz questions. In past sections of the course I felt as though I knew exactly what was being asked of me, and I typically did very well on those tests/quizzes. This was because I knew what was being asked. I minored in English at my local university. I pride myself on my writing skills. However in this section the wording felt unrelated to the course work, most of the questions were so vague that all of the multiple choice answers often times seemed to ALL be able to work. Even more strange was the intense push for They/Them pronouns. I am a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and I love our understanding and care for each other, BUT giving make believe people they/them pronouns in TEST scenarios is an atrocious decision. I don't know this person in the question beyond the one or two sentences in the question. EXAMPLE: A name would be mentioned, like "Florence," and I wasn't sure if this was a place, or a person, especially since a "Design team" was also mentioned in the question. So when the question was finally posed with "How do they approach this dilemma?" I had no idea who "THEY" was. Is Florence a person that identifies as they/them, are we talking about the design team, who the heck is "THEY." In the real world, respect is number one. However, when making a test that involves make believe people that DO NOT have real feelings to hurt, we have got to start speaking proper english. Begin by cutting the majority of "They/Them" scenarios out unless you run the risk of offending a real person that is presented in the scenario as themselves, identifying as they/them. It was so confusing that a few times I literally had to get the question wrong to see the red box response in order to know what was being asked of me. Not cool.
Besides these two cons, I really enjoyed this course and felt like a lot of work had been put into it. I appreciate all that I have learned and look forward to these final two sections of Google's UX Design coursework. Thank you again!