Project Log: Stripping it Back and Speeding it Up
My mentor told me last week to, well, speed up. To stop trying to hold my breath until I had this massive, “perfect” solution ready. And this week… I think I’m finally starting to catch the rhythm of what she meant.
It’s quite a jarring feeling, honestly. Part of you wants to make the logic absolutely watertight, and the other part is just acutely aware of the developer schedule ticking away in the background. I’ve basically spent the last few days bouncing between those two extremes: obsessing over interaction details on one hand, and frantically pushing the user research forward on the other.
I have to be a bit careful about what I say (NDAs and all that, as I mentioned), but I can talk broadly about how the week actually felt.
Hiding the Complexity: Doing Less with Templates
A massive chunk of my time went into figuring out the “layering” logic for the drone’s shooting templates.
How to put it… when we first discussed it internally, the technical breakdown was incredibly granular. For instance, user movement states were chopped up into five highly precise categories. From an engineering standpoint, it’s brilliant. But intuitively? If I’m just an average bloke who’s just unboxed a drone, I don’t have the patience to figure out if I’m in “restricted movement” or “free movement”. I just want to shoot a decent video.
So, in the meetings, we spent ages just… cutting things away. Stripping those complex categories down into language a human might actually understand.
Then there was the issue of combining features. You can layer some extra effects over basic tracking shots. But if you’re already doing something intense, like ski tracking or cycling… well, we decided to just not support layering for now. It’s about making the decision for the user, really, to stop them from Frankenstein-ing together a shot that’s completely unusable.
To make this obvious, I sketched out a new selection page. Just three simple tabs, and I added a timeline for the templates you can layer. Honestly, when you take a tangled mess of backend logic and squash it into a simple interface with a few buttons… it’s a very strange feeling. I probably still need to churn out the interaction mocks a bit faster, but the general direction is sorted.
Hearing Real Voices: The Quagmire of Research
The other half of my week was essentially spent drowning in user research.
We’re trying to understand people who play control-heavy games (shooters, action games) and figure out their habits when using hardware like ours. Sounds simple, right? Just send out a survey.
But… tweaking a questionnaire is soul-destroying work. You constantly have to second-guess what the respondent is thinking when they read a question. I went over it several times with the UX research team this week. We added all those dry, structural questions you just have to ask (the who/what/where/when), and changed the final question from single to multiple choice, just to scrape a bit more useful data out of it.
Collecting the surveys and screening people was maddening, too. We had to actively filter out anyone linked to R&D, and keep a strict cap on the number of interns, just terrified of polluting the sample and ending up with fake conclusions. We scheduled a maximum of 5 interviews a day. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but trying to stay hyper-alert for an hour, digging into the real motives behind people’s subconscious habits… it completely drains you.
A Few Closing Thoughts
There’s still a lot of invisible “friction”, of course. Having to explain my intern status, navigating the labyrinth of getting administrative forms signed off, chasing people in group chats to approve the survey… sometimes, in a big company, pushing even the smallest task forward feels like fighting a boss battle.
But I think I’m starting to get what my mentor meant by “fast”.
If I were still doing a university project, I’d probably still be agonising over the phrasing of a single survey question, or exactly how rounded the corners on that Tab bar should be. But now? Just sort the core logic, get the survey out, lock in the interview list. Getting the wheel actually turning, completing the loop… I suppose that’s the more pragmatic approach. Allow for some rough edges and imperfections to exist, and fix them when you actually get real feedback.
Next week is heavy on offline interviews. Hopefully, we actually unearth something valuable.
Right, that’s it for now. I need a bit of a breather this weekend.
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