week of 11 mar

Virgin Wines

So it begins! I had pre-selected the people I thought would be a great collaborative group: Hanley for her love of research, Max for his impeccable attention to detail and organization, rob for his prototyping and testing interest, and Harry for his design exploration. This all complimented my desire to project manage and do the low-fi wireframing.

Luckily for me, they were all game. With the first week, we did team building and started our research.

Hanley set up the Miro boards and we went to town creating questions to ask Graham in the initial meeting. The rest of the week was spent doing IRL post-its for questions, exploring the brief and deciding paths to take as we started to organize our project approach.

In the first meeting, I asked to be nominated as the project leader. It was a little daunting, because I didn’t want to be too overbearing or … bossy! I sent out a google form to everyone and gained an idea of what they were excited to do, what they dreaded, and how they handle being on a team so that I got an overall view of what to do moving forward. From there we set up our group chat to use for all communication.

This week, we focused on doing our heuristic markups. Each of us separately critiqued about us, events and checkout, both mobile and desktop. We did a quick markup first, and then went forth with a detailed heuristic analysis using both Nielsens principles and accessibility guidelines. I also complied customer reviews from trip advisor to get a sense for what the people were saying was great and not so great.

We had one more touchbase before the weekend to make sure we all knew which markups we were doing, other tasks to look over if you finished, and to see Harry’s dog on zoom.

All Else

This week, I continued applying for internships. I’m feeling a bit worn out from all the applying and it’s got me nervous about actually entering the industry as a graduate looking for a job… I met in person with Harry from Neon Tribe. His energy felt a little unhinged, but it was exciting to talk to him and make the connection. Although he did say within the first five minutes he had no internship opportunities, which was the crux of us meeting, but would keep me in his back pocket for future projects. Well, it’s something.

(later in the week, after writing above) Harry Brignull wasn’t looking for an intern (when I cold message asked on linkedin), but came back the next day saying one of his clients might be. Well, lo and behold they are a legal design agency based in Paris, with a woman CEO and a small team of seven. Too good to be true? To my shock, Harry willingly offered up connecting me with the CEO in a starter email. From there, I connected with the head of design and HAVE AN INTERVIEW SET!