After the 3 week Easter break, Monday morning’s session involved going over the work we have completed the project so far. We looked at what we had achieved and whilst this gave me the feeling of achievement, it suddenly dawned on me how little time with had left. I have completed so much work and learnt so much over the last 12 weeks, but these last few weeks of pulling everything together are so important to the finalisation of my project. After this recap, we were put into groups and asked to research potential employers. I was placed together with the two other designers so we could discover (UX) design agencies who we were interested in. We had to research three companies in total and the first one was given to us to get the ball rolling. The company name provided to us was FoolProof UX as they have a local office in Norwich along with London and Singapore. Secondly, we had to choose a firm who are based in London so we found Webcredible. Lastly, having to choose a company even further afield, we investigated Fantasy Interactive who have offices in New York and San Francisco. I really enjoyed looking into these companies because it gave me an overall perspective on how the industry works outside of a learning environment. Analysing them against certain criteria was especially interesting because it helped me to look at them as a potential business to work for rather than just consider the services they offer. For example, we were asked to find out their annual turnover and number of employees. Discussing the businesses in this way got me excited at the prospect of work after university and really set in stone how important it is to start career progression, for example enrolling for an internship, during my time studying at NUA.
The next day I spent working on the rest of the tasks for the week. I started to look at things I had to complete my to-do list and breaking them down into manageable sections. I have quite a lot of little things to try and achieve by the end of the week, so if I space them out well enough then everything will get done with minimal stress. Whilst doing so, however, Jamie called myself and Jason to his desk to speak about the upcoming business report due at the end of the project. This business report is to include references to methodologies we have used to back up our decisions along the duration of the project. I have never written a business report before, nor have I read one, so this is a daunting thought for me. Having said this, I am looking forward to researching relevant design methodologies and seeing how these link to my personal design choices.
In my current to-do list, I have “Input content into ‘The Greenhouse’ and ‘Food’ pages”. When I reviewed the whole website again, I decided I wasn’t happy with a lot more than that just these two pages. As a result of this, I made a list of all the pages I wanted to improve stated what I wanted to work on. This list includes some suggestions from the to-do list I have already written but is mainly new improvements I thought of whilst browsing through. I ranked these in order of importance and difficulty to help me organise and prioritise tasks better. Firstly, I gave them a general rating out of ten, one being low importance/difficulty and ten being high importance/difficulty. From this, I could rank them within themselves.
- Adjusting the content to be more relevant and have an equal amount on each page.
- Include better images of the food and wine. I downloaded royalty free images to feature and whilst they are good quality, they aren’t accurate to what The Greenhouse has to offer.
- I have recently downloaded a plug-in called Shortcodes Ultimate which includes a lot of different ways to display content on WordPress pages and posts. This one plug-in does the job of a handful of others I have downloaded, so if I had utilised this feature sooner, my work would have the same theme throughout and I would be able to control all the features in the same way. Hindsight is a beautiful thing.
All-in-all, I am extremely pleased with the way my development has progressed over the weeks. I am in a comfortable place to show my prototype website to the public (within reason, as per the Memorandum of Understanding’s password protection clause) and hear their thoughts. I am looking forward to people outside of my University testing it because not all of my potential participants are as technologically in touch as myself and my peers.