UX WORKSHOPS
I completed UX Night School's winter workshop series – an intensive weekend of four human-centered design and research courses. During the series we covered the origins and ontology of “User Experience”, explored accessibility in the physical environment, and visited the Portland Mercado to conduct an ethnographic interview. We performed Usability and Accessibility Audits for nonprofit websites, built paper prototypes, and kickstarted portfolio projects with community organizations.
NEIGHBORHOOD ACCESSIBILITY AUDIT
We spent a morning exploring and documenting infrastructure, systems, and physical barriers to accessing them in our immediate neighborhood – Portland's inner Southeast industrial area. Understanding the physical environment and our surroundings allowed us to think about technologies and systems as interconnected.
What we looked for:
Infrastrucure: e.g. sidewalks, bridges, transit systems.
Evidence of Systems: Schedules, Instructions for Use, Rules.
Physical Barriers.
ETHNOGRAPHIC INTERVIEW AT THE PORTLAND MERCADO
We visited the Portland Mercado – marketplace, event space, commercial kitchen, and business incubator – to conduct an interview with the managing director and document the systems in use by such a complex organization. Our goal was to gather information, analyze it, and report back what we observed with the aim of improving their processes.
