"Human Centered Design: A User-Centric Approach to Designing Learning Models for Crafting Origami"

The development of user interfaces and interactive technology has become a dominate presence in almost every experiential setting imaginable. These interactions and user experiences, especially experiences that require users to learn tasks via interactive technology, has given designers an opportunity to render more empathetic systems of interaction for the users of such interfaces. Holistically, allowing designers to effectively design, translate, and test user interfaces that place humans at the center of their creations; offering users a more enjoyable, productive, and accessible user experience. To practice this empathetic system of design, a usability case-study was conducted that examines how a group of participants learn to craft origami, with the goal of translating those varied learning experiences into an empathetically user-centric and educational mobile application. Based primarily on qualitative interviews, quantitative performance metrics, I conducted usability testing on a random sample of users with the assignment of seeing which medium of instruction users preferred to learn from when folding origami; testing consisted of instructional photos, video, and printed directions. From these observations, I artistically designed a graphical mobile experience that accommodates for participants' preferred learning methods. Research findings centered on how effectively and efficiently users were able to fold origami via the assigned methods of interaction and the adaptation of those instructional learning models into a better graphical mobile experience. Demonstrating how a focus in human centered design successfully allows designers to craft better experiences for the user.