Written by: Cherilyn Sathorn
This semester, I have learned a lot from the Neesh project, which is the project from the English for Digital Media and Technical Writing courses taught by Aida Osian. This year our Pre- MDM cohort is very lucky as we had real clients – Bin and Ying, from previous generations of Pre-MDM. It has been about two months that our team spent a lot of time and effort finishing this project. We have tons of good memories of it.
Throwback to the first day, when I knew that the topic of the first-semester project was about LGBTQ2+ application improvement; I was thrilled and excited. I wanted to be a researcher for this project as I wanted to know, explore and understand more about our target users’ mental health and needs. Consequently, I booked myself as a researcher and UX designer on our project team charter. Even though user interface design is what I am familiar with the most, I still want to know more about how to be a researcher and UX designer.
However, in some circumstances, I need to help my friends, the UI designer teammates, to finish their work even though it is not my responsibility as they have never tried designing UI before. They didn’t even know how to start and use UI tools. I spent some extra time teaching them and fixing their prototype. Also, I sometimes taught UI team members from another group to do some techniques. In my opinion, we are friends and have the same goal to finish our project, so it is okay for me to spend more time doing extra work and teaching them. On the other hand, my teammates also taught me new skills from what they knew. I would say that we learned a lot from one another; not only I learned hard skills and some new soft skills.
What impacted me the most on this project? My presentation skill has improved a lot since I did so much practicing and established a natural public speaking style. I could reduce my anxiety by facing the problem. Even though I still need more improvement, I am happy that I have a few changes every time I do it. Setting a small goal in every step is an excellent way to make me feel good when I try to do something big. I can improve, but I need more time to process the changes.
As I mentioned, we have a short time to do this project. At first, I had several ideas that I couldn’t do as the scope was too big, so we might not have enough time to finish. If we had more time, I would dig deeper into our research, gain more details about UX/UI feedback from the user interview, and use the interviewing results to improve our prototype again.
Moreover, our target users, LGBTQ2+, are a fantastic group of people. They are the same as straight people, as we are all human. I believe everyone has their preference, and it doesn’t depend on gender; it depends on the individual. For instance, two straight girls still like a different colour, even though they both are straight. This means we cannot judge people that they must like purple just because they are gay. I am interested in this topic, so if we had a more extended period for this project, I would have tried to choose another problem on the Neesh application, which is more related to psychology. It would be more challenging for me as a researcher and UX designer to solve the problem and have deep conversations with the target users during an interview.
Last but not least, even though it was a challenge to finish the whole process in a minimal time, it has been a great memorable project for me. I am so proud of my teammates. Everyone did a very great job in their position. We also pushed one another to break their bubble. Fortunately, our team rarely has conflict. As you know, we are excellent teammates! I love this project so much and hope I will have the chance to work with these people again 🙂