Technical Area: I’ve definitely learned more about UX design and the process of doing a project from start to finish. To name a few things, I’ve learned how to conduct interviews, empathy maps, creating personas, wire framing, and low-fidelity prototyping.
Tools: I’ve learned how to use Balsamiq for wire framing and prototype design, Asana for project management and organizing tasks, and Mural for collaborating with my group members.
Soft Skills: These past few weeks, I have learned how to work with a team in a remote setting. It’s definitely a new experience for me.
Achievement highlights:
I was able to create a persona based on the information from the interviews I had with people.
Conducted a few interviews and saw improvement in terms of asking the right follow up questions.
Attempted wire framing for the STEM-Away website to better understand the structure of the site.
Attendance:
I was late for the very first meeting, but caught up on the materials and went to all the meetings after that.
Goals for upcoming week:
This week, I will be working on developing the final designs of the STEM-Away website with a few other members of my team, so my goal is to learn more about the features and programs that STEM-Away offers in order to be able to design a functional site that is perfect for its current and new users.
Tasks completed:
Website layout: Early on, my team got to talk about the pros and cons of the Stem-Away website during one of our regular meetings. We then got a chance to work on a website layout that we thought would make the STEM-Away site better based on these inputs.
Empathy maps: There were many stages for this task. After brainstorming ideas about potential people who would use Stem-Away and the kinds of thinking they would have with my team, I attempted to make an empathy map on my own based on the template that my mentors provided. I later created another empathy map based on the interviews I conducted.
Interviews: My mentors provided the team with resources to use to help us with conducting interviews. I drafted a few main questions that I knew I wanted to ask people and ended up interviewing two undergraduate students. It was very interesting for me to see things from a new user’s point of view and their insight helped me to develop a more accurate persona representing undergraduate students.
Personas: I created a persona before and after conducting interviews. My first persona was an exercise to get me to start thinking about what certain groups and people are actually thinking and feeling. For my second persona, I worked on it with another group member and later presented it to the whole team to get feedback and explain our thought process. I also reached out to my mentors as we were working on the personas for clarification questions.
Wireframing: My mentors provided the team with some resources for using Balsamiq and over the weekend, I got to try out Balsamiq to create a visual framework of the Stem-Away site.
Technical: I’ve learned how to conduct interviews and how to frame questions for surveys and interviews.
Tools: Asana for project management, Balsamiq for low-fidelity prototyping, and Mural for collaborating with other members.
Soft Skills: Presenting and working with a team in a remote setting.
Achievement highlights:
Designed and revised the pathways page for our STEM-Away website.
Conducted user interviews and helped to create a survey form
Meetings/Training:
Missed one of the meetings, but watched the recording later that day.
Goals for the Upcoming Week:
This week, I hope to be able to finalize our website design, start doing some high fidelity prototyping and learn how to use Figma.
Tasks done:
I got to design and revise the pathways page for our STEM-Away website based on feedback from other groups and mentors. I also collaborated with the team on making a Google survey form to ask how others thought about our version of the STEM-Away website. I did not realize how long the low-fidelity prototyping process would take, but my mentors were very patient and provided us with a lot of resources and did a great job guiding our group throughout.
Technical Area: I’ve learned about UX design, the process of doing a project from start to finish, Gestalt principles, how to conduct interviews, empathy maps, creating personas, wire framing, lo-fi and hi-fi prototyping.
Tools: I’ve learned how to use Balsamiq for wire framing and prototype design, Asana for project management and organizing tasks, Google forms for making user surveys, Figma for hi-fi prototyping, and Mural for collaborating with my group members.
Soft Skills: These past few weeks, I have learned how to work with a team in a remote setting. It’s definitely a new experience for me.
Achievement highlights:
I was able to create a persona based on the information from the interviews I had with people.
Conducted a few interviews and saw improvement in terms of asking the right follow up questions.
Lo-fi prototyping
Creating user surveys with Google form
Attendance:
I attended all the meetings except one, but I watched the recordings when they were available.
Goals for upcoming week:
This week, I will be working on developing the final hi-fi designs of the STEM-Away website with my team.
Tasks completed:
Website layout: Early on, my team got to talk about the pros and cons of the Stem-Away website during one of our regular meetings. We then got a chance to work on a website layout that we thought would make the STEM-Away site better based on these inputs.
Empathy maps: There were many stages for this task. After brainstorming ideas about potential people who would use Stem-Away and the kinds of thinking they would have with my team, I attempted to make an empathy map on my own based on the template that my mentors provided. I later created another empathy map based on the interviews I conducted.
Interviews: My mentors provided the team with resources to use to help us with conducting interviews. I drafted a few main questions that I knew I wanted to ask people and ended up interviewing two undergraduate students. It was very interesting for me to see things from a new user’s point of view and their insight helped me to develop a more accurate persona representing undergraduate students.
Personas: I created a persona before and after conducting interviews. My first persona was an exercise to get me to start thinking about what certain groups and people are actually thinking and feeling. For my second persona, I worked on it with another group member and later presented it to the whole team to get feedback and explain our thought process. I also reached out to my mentors as we were working on the personas for clarification questions.
Wireframing: My mentors provided the team with some resources for using Balsamiq and over the weekend, I got to try out Balsamiq to create a visual framework of the Stem-Away site.
Designed and revised the pathways page for the STEM-Away website based on feedback from other groups and mentors
Collaborated with the team to make a Google survey form asking how others thought about our version of the STEM-Away website