Written by: Shawn Gao
Time flies by. The courses for this semester will be over after the final presentation is finished. I am one of the first students to return to CDM to complete the offline programme after the pandemic ends, and iI feel incredibly fortunate. Working with people from various backgrounds has also been new and beneficial. My classmates and I have completed many projects this term, but the Neesh project particularly impressed me. To create proposals for these actual projects and include them in presentations, I learned a lot.
Let’s begin with Neesh. Two CDM students founded Neesh to create an online community platform for North America’s LGBTQ2+ student community. Many of my friends are in this community, and some of them have had or are having difficulties identifying as well as a lack of understanding from people around them. It is challenging to advance equality institutionally, and even in North America, where affirmative action is most effective, people still face systemic discrimination due to historical factors. Neesh’s initiative is very sensible for the LGBTQ2+ community, which desperately needs a place where members can support one another.
As a left-liberal who has always believed that equality and diversity are the future of human society, Neesh is not just a semester-long project for me but a part of my quest for self-fulfillment, and Bin and Ying’s pioneering spirit has deeply influenced me. I eagerly anticipate this project’s successful launch and the assistance it will offer to more people.
Every member of this project is attempting to contribute to the project’s success. In the team, I was the associate project manager and UX researcher. I worked with Yiling, another product manager on the team who was also the team leader, in the early stages of the project. My responsibilities at this stage included dividing team members, editing documents, and creating a timeline. This project was my first introduction to UI design, and with the help of online resources and team members, I learned how to use Figma quickly.
There were many bugs in our interaction prototypes in the early stages of the avatar system. Despite my lack of design experience, I assisted in resolving some interaction bugs. This was an unexpected skill gain for me, and it made me very happy to contribute in some small way to the interactive prototype section.
My focus gradually shifted from product management to conducting user research, which primarily included questionnaire design and data analysis, as the project proposal was completed and prototyping progressed. This section collects user feedback and attempts to determine the direction of the following new feature changes to the avatar system while guiding the UI designer’s prototype iterations.
We were able to make the interactive prototypes wonderful and easy to use thanks to a talented team of artists and designers. We did an excellent job of sticking to the schedule and allowing enough time for error tolerance in each task. This was critical to the successful completion of our overall project.
Some of the work in Neesh’s project could also be improved. The first is teamwork, in which team members disagree during the collaboration. This problem could have been identified and resolved earlier, allowing the team to work more efficiently. The second point that can be improved is the accuracy of the research data, identifying core users, and expanding the questionnaire collection. We can obtain more realistic and credible data in this manner, avoiding the impact of bias on product iteration. Furthermore, more face-to-face user interviews could be conducted to conduct qualitative research that is difficult to obtain through questionnaires, thereby supplementing the previous quantitative analysis.
Thank you to each and every team member for their dedication. Thank you, Neesh, for your efforts for the community and Bin and Ying for guiding us. Finally, thank you, Aida, for the time and effort you have given us. I got a lot out of the course and the project.