Web design Class 1 & 2

So the Mace class is split in two groups for our web design class, according to our level of knowledge in building a web, advance or basic.

I have done my entire website in Dreamweaver and also tried some flash but not anything on top of that. So we have been focusing the format of site, how to design the primary and secondary page. We also got introduced that by paying or putting some extra add-ons, it’s very simple to personalise the format and build a site with the help of wordpress. Also if we happened to know a bit an action scripts, we can also change a lot of the details.

Also, we got introduced to Google Adwords, or some free tools (SEO) we can found the best way to promote our sites. More amazingly,  with Google stat, we can found out in what way does people get to know our sites, what is the highest search words. How long does people has to wait till one page is loaded, how long do they stayed at your sites in average. So by knowing this info, I can track down very easily what I should do more in order to improve the popularity or your site, or other targets.

I am not 100% knowing that I can manage that but still its a good place to start!

The 2nd class we focused more towards how to handle our clients as a freelancer.This class is useful for people like us with limited experiences. I think i want to mentioned is its important that we identify and FIRED the BAD clients. At this beginning stage of being a freelancer, I am over drown with take a lot of jobs to build up portfolio/ experiences. Sometimes I come with a bad client, I would still suck with the unfairness and thought this is a must-take for new graduates until we can process to the next stage, APPARENTLY NOT!

It’s no good to keep any of them and I will not learn anything from them, they will only brings in more bad contacts and poor clients. I guess it still hard to say no to a job when I come to opportunities but after this class I have a deep thought about it and knowing how I can drop this like a bad habit and attracted to the GOOD client.

Filed under: Class Reflection

Week 6 Class Reflection on Prototyping- 30 Oct

Corrine recommend some videos to watch in the class and using what we learn from the videos, we should be able think about how can they apply to our own business.

The first video we learned about is to share the ideas. Sharing is always a good thing. I have learned the benefits from sharing years ago since I was doing Graphic Design for my undergraduate. and its all about sharing ideas, talking to others and get feedback and inspiration. I think my team -creativcontrol will need more of that. Oleg and I has send out some questionnaires and got some feedback but I think more importantly is to really start a conversation and talk to more people.

The second video is about the student project from Standford. The video demonstrates the whole design thinking process, how they discuss an idea, then prototypes and more prototypes. And most importantly they managed to ask other students from the school to test it out for them and follow up by some useful reflections. So for our team, it is very important in the later stage we should all go to an airport with our prototypes and able to take pictures and survey the audiences.

There are more videos shown in the class but I think the most important thing that we ought to learn is there are many different ways to do Prototyping. By trying all of them, we will soon realise our problems behind and fail early! Role play, very quick dirty prototyping are all useful in a way. The reason is that some people think these are all wasting time but ‘Failing early’ is the fastest route to going to success!

Filed under: Class Reflection, Design thinking

Reflection on your Team Role for last week of October

I always act as a secretary for my team, I drop down summary of  all the meetings also with assigned job. The first aim was to make our own team members or anyone would love to know what’s going on with each of the meetings and in this way its easy to remember in the future. Secondly, we also hope that in case anyone who missed the meeting or people with English as their second language would find it easier to catch up after the meeting and language would be a barrier.

In term of achievements, as a graphic design I created the logo of our company ‘creativ control’ and also responsible for the interface of the team blog. My role is also to give visual ideas to the design of the potential products as chair and green bag.

Filed under: Class Reflection

Week 5 Class Reflection on Storytelling

On week 5, we focused on discussing about methods and the good uses of story telling.

We looked at a couples web sources in class and that had shown different approaches of story telling.
1. Text
2. Data visuialisation
3. Map-telling
4. Documentary
5. Film
6. Animation

I think that putting personal opinion on story telling might also be a very helpful sources to the audience, such as the rating for movies and videos in youtube. Rate certain stories or give it a marking standard above the content, so that people know how good/bad this story is and what does the majority of people think about that particular story.

We also introduce the concepts of ‘Persona’ in class. In term of business research, persona are given as a term and easily describe as fake people based on real founding. It is a generalisation of the specification of our research.  We had ‘Sharon or ‘Roxanne’ as an examples in class. Persona means mask or character derived from Latin.

Wile we are in different stages of producing a products, whether from designing or manufacturing we might lost track form the objective of the business and asked ourselves ‘Why do we want it?’ or ‘ Why do we do this?’. Then it is time for us to go back and think about our Persona.  It is almost like an innovation compare with logical design thinking.

After that we have further our discussion on the scale of design, has it gone from BIG to small? Decades ago people used to design a rail system connecting different cities, compare to nowadays most people are plainly designing a plastic shape of a fax machine. To reflect on this discussion, I have certain amount of agreement but not wholeheartedly. It is true that different industries are mostly mature now in our 21st century however there are always improvements of product/ service from better design, along with less traditional thinking and a moving forward attitude. In some ways the scale of a design project can be determine and discovered by the individuals with new technology possible.

Next, we came up with a test to demonstrate the fact survey’s result can used as a tool and support but do not trust it all. It can be pointless when the method of the survey are wrong or simple enough to miss out important details. This statement are proved by the Camera SLR value test that we did in class.  We have half the class with their eye closed and not knowing what the rest of the class are doing. Student with eye opened as the first group were asked to announce how much will they sell of this particular digital slr which held as an example, figures came up from £500 to £1000. Following by the students who have their eye open now and expressed the value they think they will paid for this camera. Lowest price were shout as £150 because it is a second had or depreciation of the value as a high tech product etc. But as the fact that sellers always over estimate their true value of the product and buyers will tried their best lower the price and always willing to pay less than expectation.

Filed under: Class Reflection

Week 4 Class Reflections -Own systems triangle numbers

In order to have a success business, what do I need to know or have? (10 mins task)
This is what I have written down:
Luck, Ideas, Experience, Expertise, Time, Cost, Personal Management, A business plan, networking,
…
…
… and the list goes on.

We discussed about Activity Theory and looked at a systems analysis model. Here’s my individual results:

Provider: Wendy Ng.

User: (A specific description of your customer)

Constraints: 7

Community: 2

Roles: 11

Objects: 5

User needs: 0

Total: 25

Looking at my results, I quickly realised how I have neglect the ‘users’ in my business and they are almost the most important position of a business. Same as what I concluded from listening to other teams business idea. Me and my team are currently lacking concern on the users.

Very important note from MACE’s blog “By understanding all of the elements of the activity and how they fit together, it can be easier to visualise and understand where areas for improvement can be found, and track your thinking. It can also act as a way to find new innovations by trying it with extreme users, or changing a category in a new way.” I quickly understand how I have neglect the user in my business.

Couple other things to remind myself after discussion during the class:
1. When we look at potential market, we need to think about the constraints but not just from the market research! For example research shows that there are 2000 people in UK who love hot dogs and willing to have one per day. Howver, the stalls that you owe can only provide 200 hot dogs a day. Therefore we need to take that to consideration when we looking at market research and the real situation.

2. Toilet papers in UK vs China
If you are a company producing tissue pack in China and thinking about investing the market in UK. You should realise a shift of role from the community network to users themselves – the fact that no one carry pack of tissues in UK whereas in China it’s almost a personal responsibility to provide yourself tissues paper when using toilets.

Filed under: Class Reflection, Design thinking

Week 4 Class Reflection on Systems Analysis

Our class started off by watching an video advertisement from company Volkswagen. During the video we have not seen any image of a car produced by the brand, instead we got introduced to the idea called  ‘fun theory’. When a company is so well developed and got a long history of itself, advertisements sometimes need not to show the products but more likely to state a lifestyle that the brand is subjecting with the little support of the logo.

Another company that I can think of has recently use the same way to advertise themselves and have successful result is Blackberry.

Follow by the video, different business teams were asked to present to the class their initial business idea and different roles of their members. Oleg is our team leader, he introduced our company  ‘creativcontrol’ by presenting our business statement and business objectives. You can read about our company and our roles on our blog.

Other companies in the class also have some fantastic ideas, I am very interested at Team 2 and looking forward to their products. One point that I picked out by listening to other companies was we are lacking of public opinion. I think our team should set out some questionnaires about our products.

Filed under: Class Reflection, Design thinking, Week 4