It’s a wrap!

This will be my last blog post here as, excitingly, I’ve got a job and so it seems fitting to wrap up this blog on that piece of good news.

It’s been a crazy intense journey but I am thrilled to be joining the team at the Government Digital Service very soon and start contributing to all the great work that’s being done there. It’s a fabulous opportunity and I love the fact that I’m going to be working on things which help people.

I’m so pleased that I made the decision (see: eventually strong-armed into it by Robbie after listening to me go on about it for months and months) to change my career. Was it scary? Yes. But you know what, that’s what made it all the more exciting.

So what happened after the GA course ended? Well, there was Christmas, which I had been fantasising about during the last sprint of the course – lying on the sofa, eating chocolate coins and drinking my body weight in mulled wine. Unfortunately I had forgotten about the small matter of having a toddler so not much lazing around was done (although I did manage to sneak in a few glasses of bubbly, ha). Then there was the panic and rush of getting together everything for the GA meet and hire event, including website portfolio, printed boards and CVs. Finally, networking, job applications and interviews.

(I really enjoyed the interviews, talking through my UX experience so far and why I’d made the career change. I even enjoyed the design challenges a couple of companies set me. The most terrifying one was the in-interview challenge that I couldn’t prepare for, but it went pretty well.)

I also really enjoyed writing this blog along the way. Don’t fret, you can still catch me on Medium sharing my musings, but in the meantime, if anyone needs me I’ll be buying a new work wardrobe and hanging out at play groups.

Thanks for reading 😀

Presentation next week!

The kind of kanban I like to see. So many done things! #ux

Client project: week 2

I can’t believe we’re already on week 2 of our client project and I haven’t blogged anything about it! The last stretch is going so quickly.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have an amazing client for my final project, and a fabulous team. I’m the team leader which is both exciting and challenging. It means I get to be in charge of the kanban board (yessss… little post-its, you belong to me) and make sure we are on brief, on track and that everyone is happy and not crying in the toilets.

Our client is Unbound, a crowdfunding publisher. We’re working on a very interesting project for them and I just love the company and their ethos. More details to come but here are some photos of today, spent working in their office and testing our paper prototype with authors. I was pretty nervous beforehand about how our sketches would be received, especially as we were meeting some incredible people (founder of War Child, writer on QI, son of Huw Wheldon) but it was all fine. Better than fine, we got some amazing insights and feedback that I would never have thought of. Testing is brilliant!

Visual Design week in pictures

And a birthday…

Halfway through the GA course….

And we have swag!!!

Presentation DONE!

Champagne now.
Case study to follow!!!!

Sketching and persona-ing

Only 3 more working days until our Project 3 presentation…. how did that happen??

Project 3 week 1

Life this week has mostly been post its, pin ups and pizza. Plus one little girl watching Star Wars with her daddy when mummy worked on Saturday.  Hmm…..

Project 2 case study: John Lewis My Home

We were required to write our Project 2 e-commerce case study on Medium.com so here is the link to view it there.

Project 2 case study

Feel free to leave me any thoughts/ feedback! This is the most robust piece of work I have done so far and it was definitely challenging. If I could go back again I would spend more time sketching different concepts. I really liked a few things that came out of the design studio, but then decided on them too early I think. Next time I would like to do some concept testing before I start sketching full on flows.

One of the hardest bits about this project was user testing. I didn’t realise how difficult it would be to ask non-leading questions and resist the urge to start explaining everything straight away! It’s also quite a shock when users don’t understand something that seemed so clear to you when you were designing it. Once again this is a good reminder that I AM NOT THE USER. Now that I have a better idea of how to conduct testing I want to do more!

A few things I really enjoyed:

• The storytelling part of UX. Presenting my proposal was a lot of fun. When I was in Client Services I would present the big picture stuff, it’s great going into the details and the exciting stuff more 🙂
• Sketching. I’m not great at drawing but it turns out you don’t have to be. Just enough to get your point across and you can do that with stick men and boxes and arrows. Design studio was definitely the highlight of the course so far.
• User research. Talking to people! Asking them questions! People do this for a living – amazing.
• Card sorting with candy. Because then we ate the candy.
• Wireframing. Now, this was challenging getting to grips with Omnigraffle, but once I got into the groove I found it quite methodical and dare I say, relaxing! Also, it’s great seeing your sketches come to life in a more ordered fashion!

Someone said on Friday that UX is never done. That is so true because already I am itching to go back into this project and starting ripping bits up that I’m not happy with, tweak a few other things and do some more testing. But of course if I did that then I would never sleep 😉 and that’s a big enough problem already, thanks very much!

I believe I’ve developed enormously over the last two weeks and am really looking forward to putting all of these learnings into practice for Project 3.

Onwards!

Study + parenthood = zzzzzzzzz

Week 3 finished with our Project 2 presentations which I was fairly pleased with although I can already see many improvements which could be made. Case study to come over the weekend and I’d love some feedback and thoughts.

There’s hardly any time to rest though as Project 3 begins on Monday. This is our first group project so it’ll be interesting to see how we all adjust to working in a team instead of being siloed and drowning in our own personal Omnigraffle doom. Groups were assigned this afternoon and briefs will be handed out first thing Monday.

I wish I could say that I was a healthy way into a bottle of wine after such a long week but I’m not because Lily is not very well. Fortunately it’s not the chicken pox as we thought but she is still going to be poorly with a virus for the next few days. The last two nights have meant NO SLEEP so I’m pretty impressed that I remembered my own name during this morning’s presentations let alone talked about an e-commerce design proposal!  I hope that we all get some good sleep this weekend to recharge and head into Project 3 with all guns blazing.