As Year 2 comes to a close, the question is ‘what happens next?’

This post is a continuation from the post I wrote in February about work experience and collaborative projects between June 2018 and February 2019.

Preparing for Year 3

There’s under two teaching weeks of Year 2 left, so the focus is now on Year 3 and what’s coming up for that. Here are some things that I am doing to prepare myself for Year 3.

Dissertation idea

My first dissertation idea is mentioned in this blog post from March 5th. The idea originally was to research and write about how ‘apps that save consumers time put pressure on those working to deliver’, using Deliveroo and Amazon as good examples of companies well-known for exploiting their workers to enable them to meet unrealistic customer expectations about things like delivery times and costs. It’s a topic that has interested me for a while, but upon discussions with Jamie and attempting to research the ‘gig economy’ (as it is known), I decided that writing about this from a UX perspective was too difficult. I am now going to write about how UX and technology can help improve the accessibility of digital services.

The dissertation ideally needs to be focused around one technology or one user group/disability (e.g. focusing on how voice/sound helps improves accessibility across several disabilities or focusing on what can be done to help improve software accessibility for the partially-sighted or blind) to ensure that it has a clear focus. At the moment I am particularly interested in how udio and voice control and/or sounds can help improve accessibility for the blind, partially sighted or cognitively disabled people.

I need to submit a 1,000 word dissertation proposal with the Broads Authority project work at the end of Year 2 on May 10th, so I am working on researching this topic. To help me, I have borrowed a iPhone 7 from university for two weeks over the Easter holiday and have been experimenting with the Microsoft Seeing AI and Microsoft Soundscape apps on it. These apps are to help partially-sighted and blind people identity what’s around them. Look at the video demo of Seeing AI that I recorded below – it’s using the camera on the phone to scan the surroundings and tell me what it is seeing!

My father is 51 and I am 21 – you can see how close Seeing AI got to guessing our ages correctly! As mentioned by myself in the video, a few years ago Microsoft made a website where you could upload a photograph of yourself and it’d try to guess your age. We’re now seeing the results of this in these apps.

At the time of writing this post I still need to put a lot more work into the research and coming up with a solid plan for the dissertation, but this is one way I am beginning to prepare for Year 3 now.

Year 3 Final Major Project research

I already have a good idea lined up for the Year 3 project – despite nobody knowing what the briefs will be yet. I am assuming that we will be required to research and design a digital solution to a problem of our choice, a little like the main brief for Year 1. If this is the case then I have a good project lined up. I am attending an event at the end of May where there will be a lot of people from my focus group to do some initial formative user research on which I’m looking forward to. I am doing this quite early on for several reasons:

• If this project turns out to be a viable idea, then this event is the ultimate place to meet the target audience and conduct research on them – and the event is only on once per year. Best to get there this year and get all of the research that I think I might need. I’d hate to wish I had gone but didn’t.
• If I do this project then it will save me a lot of time in Year 3 – better to do this legwork when times are quiet than trying to rush it in when times are busier.
• It’s a good opportunity to practice ethnographic user research skills (and this would be just about as ‘ethnographic’ as you can get!)
• If it turns out not to be a good fit for my Year 3 piece, I will be able to write a personal UX case study about this and add it to the UX case studies on my portfolio. These go down well with recruiters looking on portfolios and are an excellent portfolio addition.

More details to follow once I have the attended the event and have a better idea of whether or not this will be a suitable Year 3 project idea.

Getting advice on graduate schemes from a graduate

My high school friend Hayden Tobin is on a graduate scheme with National Grid and called me at the end of March to discuss graduate schemes and tell me about his experiences. Hayden was always an extremely dedicated and driven student, so it did not surprise me that he was keen to work in a large company after graduating. He mentioned:

• Competition for graduate schemes is high – everybody wants a place. For roughly every 100-200 people that apply, only 3 will get a place.
• You need to have a tip-top portfolio and CV with relevant and up-to-date work experience and extra-curricular activities listed.
• You need to apply for as many as you can, starting in the summer and don’t stop applying and looking until around January/February time – they all open at different times.
• It’s a good idea to look online for some example questions and answers for the online personality tests and also interview questions.
• Get good at group work and working in a team, because most applications are built on teamwork!
• Don’t have your heart set on anything – apply for everything that interests you and don’t be disheartened if you don’t make it through to the one you really wanted.

It’s a tough world out there and it seems that if you want to get onto a graduate scheme then you need to be prepared to fight tooth and nail for it. Hayden said that the benefits of graduate schemes were:

• It’s generally thought to be the ‘easiest’ way to get your foot through the door at multinational and large corporations.
• The pay is generally good.
• Graduate schemes often given you the opportunity to receive professional training and explore other departments of the corporation whilst you are working.

It’s scary to think that I am only a few months away from this really mattering to me! My history when it comes to getting jobs and opportunities has just been a case of pure luck and ‘being in the right place at the right time’, but this time around there will need to be more fighting. I am going to apply for graduate schemes and research these over the summer. I know already that I’m interested in Microsoft, IBM, HP, Lenovo, automotive companies, WorldPay (who contacted me a few months ago about graduate schemes themselves after seeing my LinkedIn profile) and National Grid, so these are the sorts of companies that I’ll probably look at first.

Storehouse Issue 19

‘The Storehouse Story’ continues with Storehouse 19, the next issue of Storehouse and the first one that I am leading alone. I am planning on leading a team of 20 people to create the new magazine and update the website over the summer holidays. Featuring weekly or bi-weekly Facebook calls to keep in touch with everybody whilst university isn’t running and with a launch date anticipated to be ‘freshers’ fair 2019′, Storehouse 19 will definitely be a summer project and will really show that I can lead and manage a team – if it is a success.

In addition to leading a team to produce an outcome, I will also be spending some time between now and the summer updating the C# WPF app Article Creator software to work with the new website as well as improving the Storehouse Digital Submission Tool, which was first used in November 2018 to allow students to submit work for Storehouse 18. The initial version of this ran on the Storehouse website and used a mix of PHP and JavaScript to allow students to upload ZIP, RAR, TAR or 7z files. The same will be true for the new version, but some basic usability issues will be addressed:

• There will be more information about how to create an archive file (ZIP, RAR, TAR or 7z).
• There will be far less text on the page to make finding the key information easier.
• The system that checks for valid student numbers will be updated to ensure that all students are able to submit work.
• The maximum file size will likely be increased from 32 MB to 64 MB.

As well as these additions, the DST’s style will also be changed so that it fits into the newly-designed Storehouse website.

For a video demonstration of the original DST, look at the video below.

Professional development

The below are all about improving my network, portfolio, CV and work experience.

Networking events and Hot Source

As I move closer and closer to Year 3, professionals will start to become more and more interested in me – hopefully! I’ve been attending network events for a while now and I need to continue to attend them to meet new people, make new contacts and hopefully gain more opportunities. Hot Source is currently my preferred networking event, because:

• It is dedicated to creative and tech professionals – the industries that I want to enter.
• They run regularly – once per month.
• A lot of people attend.
• It’s free.
• They tend to be very relaxed and casual, usually in pubs.
• They have a variety of activities going on – sometimes they run workshops, screen films or have talks/presentations to watch.
• It’s run by Tom Haczewski and the team from The User Story, whom I worked with last year.

When I attend these events I like talking to professionals to find out what they’re doing and inform them of what I’m doing and where I am. But as time goes on, ‘project work’ needs to turn into ‘work experience’ and asking for ‘internships’ needs to turn into asking for a job.

I plan to continue to attend these over the summer.

My new CV

Having attended the lecture on how to achieve your dream job a month ago and learning a great deal about how to write a professional CV, I got around to updating my CV at the end of March and here it is:

The new CV includes everything that my previous one (and more!) but is just two pages longer rather than five thanks to using columns to display information and also not going into detail about each experience on it.

I learned in the lecture that you should list the software you are skilled with and also that you can drive and whether you are prepared to relocate or not on your CV too, so I have included these too. Including the software I use seems a very good idea for the industry that I want to go into.

I’ve already emailed this CV out to several companies whom I am interested about interning with this summer, read on.

Updating my portfolio

The original Pendragon Online website (which acts as my professional portfolio) was first launched in February 2017 as my university application piece. The redesigned and improved version went online on October 14th 2018 and was given a small update in March 2019 to add the following:

• More details about the chatbot that I made at Earthware on my internship in 2018.
• Information about my work placement at The User Story in 2018.
• Added my Redgate internship application as a UX case study.
• Added my freelance work with SALT Glass Studios as a UX case study and an example of a website that I have produced.
• Added redesigning The User Story’s website as an example of a UX case study.
• Added some information about the Broads Authority project as a case study.

Otherwise, the look and feel of the site is the same as it was in October 2018 when it launched.

It was necessary to update the portfolio with my recent work experience and some more examples of UX case studies because these experiences started to appear on my LinkedIn profile and on my CV but weren’t on my professional portfolio. I thought it would look odd to an employer if the portfolio did not correspond with the CV or the LinkedIn profile, so I added them in.

In February 2019 I began to code an entirely new version of my portfolio which features improved navigation, a new layout and removed some pages that I no longer deem necessary. As of April 2019 it is still under development but has been put on hold due to the Broads Authority project and Storehouse Online consuming time. The new version of my portfolio should be finished and launching by the end of September 2019, in time to apply for graduate schemes with it. The ‘mega menu’ is the key component of the new website and uses the same technology as the ‘mega menu’ in the Pendragon Finance online banking website prototype from November 2018.

A video demonstrating the new menu and its benefits in Pendragon II compared to the current site is below:

Below, you can see the reconsidered information architecture of the ‘Pendragon II’ website (from February 24th 2019). The red squares are the top-level items in the new ‘mega menu’. Items are light blue are sub-categories and items in dark blue are links to pages. This is a much better navigational structure than the existing menu system which does not allow you to visit individual pages from the menu alone.

I think it’s very important as a UX designer that your use your own principles to make your own site. This is the whole reason why the old Pendragon website (which was built on Adobe Muse back in late 2016 and early 2017) was replaced last year by a fully custom-coded website. As my practice as a UX designer improves and I start to think more about things like navigation, usability and information architecture, my portfolio website has to improve too and show that I put that thought into my own website. We judge people by how they look and we make a judgement about them within seconds of meeting them – recruiters also do the same when they land on your portfolio website. A difficult-to-navigate portfolio website doesn’t exactly scream a great UX designer or information architect, does it?

I also feel that your portfolio has to change as you change what you do. The original Pendragon site didn’t have anything about contacting me for freelance work because it was purely a portfolio for getting into university. The redesigned one, which I started to build in May 2018 and launched in October 2018, did. At the time I was taking on freelance projects and so it seemed a good idea to mix the portfolio site with a ‘sales’ site. I finished my final freelance project at the end of 2018 and decided that I didn’t want to do any more freelancing, so when the site was updated again in March 2019 some references to being available to freelance were removed and the next update will see all references to being hired for freelance jobs removed as the site is returned to a portfolio website.

Internships and work experience in 2019

It’s too early to tell if I will complete one long internship this summer, two shorter ones, one short one or even get an internship at all. Since October 2018 I have been planning internships for this summer with numerous attempts made with Redgate, IBM, Sigma, BuiltByR2 and The User Story to get an internship for the summer of 2019.

Application for internship at Sigma, Cambridge

My friend Elena Lockyer interned at Cambridge-based UX consultants, Sigma, last summer and it was a fantastic experience for her. I am keen to have another internship this summer and so have been in contact with them about interning there this year. They have my CV, portfolio and covering letter. As of April 15th, I am awaiting to hear back. Sigma do not publicly advertise this internship, you have to contact them and express an interest. The work of Sigma was mentioned in my recent ‘Evaluating user-centred design’ report.

Application for internship at BuiltByR2, London

Also not publicly advertised is work experience at BuiltByR2. I was contacted by them through LinkedIn, purely on the basis that they enjoyed my TEDx NorwichED talk from 3 years ago, asking if I’d be interested in work experience with them. After researching the company and finding out more about them I sent them my CV, portfolio and a covering letter and am also waiting to hear back from them.

Potential for work experience at IBM iX, London

Planning for this began in December 2018 and an opportunity was originally going to happen in April, but unfortunately in March it was decided that any possibility of work experience at IBM iX would need to be postponed until the summer. I am waiting to hear back from IBM to see if any progress has been made.

Returning to The User Story

I’ve mentioned to them at I am free this summer with nothing else going on at the moment. Nothing further has been discussed.

Student Ambassador events for NUA

Last summer I did several student ambassador jobs for NUA, including attending the two-day UCAS fair at the NEC in Birmingham at the end of June. I’d like to do events like these for NUA again to help promote the course and the university.

What’s next?

Wait to hear back from those internships that I applied for and also start looking into graduating schemes to see which ones interest me.

The new Pendragon Online website also needs to be finished to bring my professional portfolio completely up-to-date as well as provide a better design for the site.