1. Spotting Opportunities through the User Experience
Task issued: Week 3
Deadline: Week 6
(Progressive grading from 6 – 11)
In your team, first decide on an area to explore, which can be a place, a
product or service. You can look at an existing product or service
experience. You can also examine any consumer experience you are
curious about.
Your Mission
Your mission is to spot opportunities to meet an unmet need, to improve
user satisfaction, to address an existing problem, or even to solve an
anticipated problem. Through this, you can achieve one or more of the
following: satisfy your curiosity, solve a teething problem, help others or
even generate profits.

2. Purpose
This assessment will assess your ability to:
•Describe a User Experience using appropriate information sources and
to identify potential problems / areas of improvement
•Demonstrate breadth of thinking (able to see the Bigger Picture, from
multiple perspectives) and depth of thinking (able to see details and
make connections / analyse implications)

3. Deliverables
Your team will make a presentation of the User Experience (with multiple
perspectives if applicable) in class in Week 6.
You will capture the User Experience using powerpoint slides (to be uploaded to
MeL). You can use any appropriate visual tools to illustrate the User Experience.
Apart from the User Experience and your analysis with connections and
implications, include relevant background information and supporting evidences.
Please summarise and highlight only key findings. Details can be separately
captured in Appendices. Do include references if you use secondary information.
The team presentation in Week 6 should not last longer than 15 mins per team.
Your tutor will give you an initial grade after the presentation and feedback on
inadequate work / areas of improvement. Your team can carry out more
research in Weeks 7 – 11 and share your findings with your tutor. He or she may
re-grade your work as you seek to continuously enhance it.

4. Guiding Pointers
Think about:
•The Users: Who? How big is the market? Different groups of users?
•Other players: Any people whom users have to interact with (eg service
provider, sales-person, counter staff, call centre etc)
Decide:
•Types of info to gather to describe the User Experience and other
perspectives.
•If primary research is needed, think about:
• Why? (Purpose / Objective)
• How to collect the info (Who? Where? When? What to ask /
observe etc?)
• What to prepare before actually collecting the info (eg making
appointments, preparing checklists, designing questionnaires /
discussion guides etc)

5. Guiding Pointers
• Actual fieldwork:
• Weeks 4 and 5
• You may need to make > 1 visit because:
• Different behaviours take place during different times / places
• Need to look deeper into specific aspects of a User Experience
• Analysis / inference:
• Based on information / facts collected, draw inferences, make
connections (eg categorise, compare and contrast)
• Identify areas of focus.

6. Criteria for assessment