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Super late update

In the crazy throws of the final project I wasn't able to update what we were doing each day. We presented to our client last Wednesday so we're done! Let's leave it at that for right now. I'm currently racing against the clock to get my case studies ready for tomorrow's portfolio review and then getting everything online and pretty for next Friday's exhibition where we show tons and tons of people what we've been doing for the past few months. 

That being said, I need to get back to work!

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Really beautiful video that my classmate showed us the other day.

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Catching Up from Last Week

We've started our final project! I haven't posted in a while – probably because last week we were learning coding (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and my brain was on a continuous meltdown. Our assignment last week was to get as far along as possible on creating our online portfolio. I decided from the get-go that I didn't want to work with a template. I have a clear vision of what my portfolio will look like and I felt like hunting for bits and pieces of different templates to combine together would be inefficient and messy. So, I embarked on the scary adventure of coding it myself. I started using Foundation but had never used a framework before and had to wrap my head around what the heck a framework is and then try to customize the CSS. I gave it my best shot and consulted with some of the web development students next door, but by the end of the week I had very little to show. Over the weekend, I got help from a developer who happens to be my boyfriend. He took bits of my code and made everything much easier to work with. I now have the structure set up thanks to him but I still need to put all of the content in, tweak things to my liking, and pray that it doesn't break. 

Which brings us to this week – Week 8 for UXDI. We started our final project with a real living breathing client. I'm part of a team of three working with SavingsSquirrel, a soon-to-be app for kids to learn about personal finance. Yesterday we had our kickoff meeting with our client which was very helpful. We had received a brief about the company and project but reading that led to many questions that needed to be answered in person. 

My teammates looking over an early prototype that our client created.

After our meeting, we laid out all of the information we received in a concept map to organize our thoughts. Given our short timeline of barely over two weeks to complete the project, we really have to focus in on what we want to achieve. Our client left the deliverables up to us so prioritizing early on will be critical. As for the schedule, we are all feeling stressed about the short timeline. To keep on track, we made an overview calendar with each phase of the process. With some extra time yesterday, we jumped into the research phase and started a competitive analysis.

Today, we didn't have much workshop time since the day was chock full with lectures and then a studio tour at USA Today. We were able to write out our user interview questions and we stayed after class to do our first two user interviews. Tonight, we're doing more interviews with parents and a few kids in the target age group (exciting!) and organizing our notes for analysis tomorrow. Luckily tomorrow we have more time for project work – we could definitely use it. 

Our first user interview with Ramya taking notes on the right and me (in the red pants) conducting the interview.

Phew! That was a lot of writing and photos. I'll try to keep more on top of this so that I don't have to catch up on a week's worth of information.

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We're working on pulling together our first case study for our upcoming portfolios. On the left, I sketched out an icon for each step in my UX process (Research, Sketch, Wireframe, IA, Digitize, Prototype, Test). I'm currently obsessed with wanting to animate them on my case study page. I tried to do it in Photoshop but it wasn't working very nicely since it's basically frame-by-frame animation (like the old days of Disney). I'm downloading AfterEffects and I want to see if I make a better version. Hopefully the learning curve for this program isn't too steep. On the right are some sketches of ideas for what my portfolio could look like. If I can get the icons animated nicely and keep the path through the case study smooth, I think it's going to look really good!

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This is Visual Design week! So excited! I've only had a small amount of formal design training and I'm very happy to add to it. This week we're also diving into personal branding for the upcoming job hunt (and life in general). We did quite a few fun exercises today to figure out what "brands" or identities we align with - one of which is creating a mood board. I'm still working on mine but the current progress can be seen in the bottom photo. Nicely aligning with visual design and branding week, I've been working hard to come up with a personal logo since last week. I've come up with a few ideas that I like but when I put them into Illustrator, they just don't look as good as they do on paper. I'll keep working on it. Some of my sketches are in the top photo.

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This is our web prototype that we presented on Friday. We received some really great feedback from our classmates and our guest critic, Joe Chrisman from nclud. My team huddled after presentations were over and realized we weren't happy with our final product. We really wanted to keep working on it and do another iteration but since we're on class time, we're already moving on to the next project. We decided to let it be for a couple of weeks and not look at it (we've looked at it non-stop for 2 weeks now). When we have time either towards the end of the course or after the course is over and we're prepping our portfolios, we're going to do another iteration and see where it goes. 

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Haven't posted in a while - this last week was tunnel vision to the presentation on Friday. So, I'm backtracking and uploading all of my team's final deliverables. 

These are our three personas: Maggie, Chad, and Arthur. We created a survey about utility companies and energy consumption and collected nearly 80 results over the course of 2 days. We then synthesized our results by age group and created these personas to reflect each age group. Each persona has an orange quote at the top which is a real quote from the one open-ended question in our survey (which was "Tell us about your utility company's website. The good, the bad, lay it on us.")

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InVision for days.

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This week is already flying by. Yesterday and today we've been working on wireframes and mock ups and late this afternoon we started making a clickable prototype in InVision. We ran through two short user tests and made some small changes based on those and we're planning to do more user testing tomorrow. Photos above: Top: A few early sketches trying to work through what the data visualization will look like in the dashboard. Second from top: Sketching what the new user sign-up will look like and how bill pay could work. Third from top, left: Sketches of the alert system and Arthur's user flow through his scenario. ..., right: This little guy is Opie, OPower's mascot (we took the liberty of naming him). We wanted a reward system for saving energy so we came up with the idea of hats for Opie - when you save more energy, you earn a new hat. We wanted to keep the tone lighthearted - who knew dealing with utilities could be so fun? Bottom: Sketching it all out yet again.

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On Friday we presented where we are and got feedback from our other classmates which was a good thing to do to wrap up the week. After that we broke up tasks for the weekend - each of us is taking a persona scenario and doing the user flow and associated wireframes and then tomorrow we'll compare wireframes and create better versions of the ones that work best. Oh, and Matt drew me. Totally resembles me, right?

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Today for our project we did some competitive analysis, plotting companies/products on two different affinity charts - one with brand strength and product vs software axes and the other with feature scope axes. We then applied the Moscow Method to prioritize features for our product, listing out a manifesto of what our final product must have, should have, could have, and won't have. After that we jumped into sketching out what we think some of these features could look like.

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Today during workshop we discovered our survey results had doubled from 30 submissions yesterday to nearly 70 today! So first thing first, we went through all the results again by age group and updated our three personas to reflect the data. After that we had to think through how to group the comments we received in our one open-ended question on the survey (which was "Tell us about your utility company's website. What's good, what's bad?". We wrote each comment or point on a post-it note and then grouped similar comments together. That revealed three main categories of comments - usability (navigation, easy or hard to use), data, and bill payment. We then marked each comment as positive, negative, or neutral with a green, red, or orange dot. Tonight our team is mulling over the comments to try to pinpoint what the key problems are with utilities. Oh and our personas now have names! Maggie, Chad, and Arthur. We've grown quite attached to our characters already. More to come on them soon.

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Had a great time touring nclud today -- really really cool environment and people! (at nclud)

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Busy day! My team conducted a few user interviews and started analyzing the survey and interview data to translate that into 3 personas (Chad, Maggie, and Michael). I discovered that it’s really difficult to create interview questions that are open-ended but lead your interviewees to tell you the information that you want! I’m excited to practice this more because I can already tell interviews are very valuable in the process of identifying the right problems to focus on and designing solutions for those specifically. The last photo is the Design Thinking DC happy hour meetup at Rocket Bar in Chinatown. It was fun! And shuffleboard is harder than it looks.

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Today is the first day of Project 3! I'm working with Matt and Theresa and we picked to work with Opower (hypothetical case for the project but very excited to dive into such a cool company). We put together a user research survey and have officially started distributing it. We're hoping for as many responses as we can get with such a limited timeline (two days for user research). The photo is Melissa being a fresh set of eyes to test the survey (our eyes were crossed after working on it for a few hours!)

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This past week was a whirlwind of working towards the deadline on Friday morning. It was nice to earn a break this weekend. These are a sampling of my final wireframes. I'm hoping I'll have time to do more user testing and make it into a more filled-out clickable prototype. 

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Feeling a little stressed Deadline on Friday morning (mental deadline: Thursday by 11pm). Time to get to work.