The Creativity Crew Projects
Once upon a time, there was a creative advertising agency, consisting of 6 young people, who took on various, difficult and undoubtedly interesting projects, being a brilliant success. This introduction describes nothing but Creativity Crew’s reality and how our company operates in business world, managing to stand out from its competitors. During this year, we had the honor to cooperate with many well-known businesses and brands such as Costa Coffee and Judah Club. Meanwhile we gained useful knowledge about tools and mobile app developing but also faced significant difficulties. Despite them, we still pulled off our projects properly and gained required experience and skills that will lead us to biggest achievements in the immediate future. At this point, let’s a take a more detailed look on our projects: the problems that occurred and the -of great importance -skills we obtained.
Our collaboration with Costa Coffee
Costa is one of the largest coffee houses in the world and especially in UK. It was founded 52 years ago in London. Costa Coffee has a very good blend quality in a low price and includes drinks, sandwiches, sweet snacks, and tees. For these reasons, we were thrilled we had the opportunity to work with this brand.
As a marketing team we focused on consumer research (online survey), secondary research (interviews), swot analysis and 4 Ps (product, price, place, promotion). We also organized a communication strategy and a target group profile. Furthermore, we created a variety of Instagram posts and stories with new and creative ideas that are related to our big idea (Costa Coffee: The boost for everything you wish). We used social media to promote the product more effectively and approach the target group that we have chosen. Finally, we analyzed our campaign idea that is related with motivation, confidence, self-esteem, and boost energy. Through our campaign people can understand that their life can change for the better and they can turn their wildest dreams into reality.
Our Experience
Through this work we gained experience on how a company works and successfully promotes its products. We learned how to collaborate and make decisions with the goal of both profit and brand awareness. We also became familiar with the approach of a consumer audience, and we learned to think out of the box, to believe in ourselves and not stop evolving.
Skills we obtained.
Furthermore, we developed main skills such as team working, communication and cooperation with the team and determination. Another important skill is the familiarization with programs, such as Canva. Through group presentations we got used to addressing to a large audience and share our ideas with confidence. We gained knowledge about our industry with the help of experts who offered us opinions about our projects and corrections that needed to be made.
Problems and solutions
A basic problem we faced was the issue of transportation and the meetings with the team in a place that would accomodate all team members. Also, the issue of time was a big problem and the different programs that existed due to work or other obligations. Sometimes we faced difficulties in communication due to the large number of people in the group. We found it difficult at first to think as entrepreneurs in the marketing field but we managed to adapt to the conditions.
Despite the problems, there are always solutions. Due to the development of technology, people have been facilitated in many ways in their daily life. For example, when we couldn’t meet, we chose to have online meetings. Regarding our communication problem, we decided to divide our responsibilities so that each team member could contribute to the process.
In general, our experience from the Costa Coffee cooperation was positive and helpful for our future career. An important fact is that we gained new knowledge and experience in a field that interests us. This project gave us the motivation to keep trying and to pursuit our improvement to this field.
Usability and User Experience
What do we mean when we use the term Usability? Usability is a measure of how well a specific user in a specific context can use a product/design to achieve a defined goal effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily. People often confuse usability with user experience but you must know usability is part of User Experience (UX) design. A design’s usability depends on how well its features accommodate users’ needs and contexts. Therefore, there are three elements you should consider when you are responsible about your design’s usability. The first one is Effectiveness. Your design should support users in completing actions accurately. The second element is Efficiency where users can perform quickly through the easiest process. And last but not least is Satisfaction where the user finds the design pleasant to use.
What’s the Heuristic Evaluation? It is an expert-based inspection method. A “discount” method for quick, cheap and easy evaluation of the user interface. The goal of Heuristic Evaluation is to identify any usability issues so that they can be addressed as part of an iterative design process. The process you have to follow requires that a small set of reviewers (or “evaluators”) examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the “heuristics”).
What we were called to do
Judah Club, a famous clothing brand in Greece, asked our team to evaluate their website-eshop as to the Usability and User Experience of their design. First things first, our team created a persona named Vicky, a 20 years old make-up student who is addicted to tik tok, wears a lot of make-up, goes out and parties and her main need is cheap clothes because she is on a budget. On the second step, we gave our persona three tasks that we as the evaluators had to follow based on the ten key points of Nielsen that we are going to explain further below. The first task was to sign up on the website, the second task was for our persona to go through the best sellers of Judah club and the third and final step was to make an order and proceed to pay for it. Through these steps our goal was to check the usability and user experience of the Judah Club website and to give back our honest feedback. The website was easy to use with the only problem being that on the best seller the eshop did not give the option of filters such as colors or sizes.
Problems + Solutions
The challenge we faced at first during our heuristic evaluation was for all our marketing team members to be on the same page and understand the key points we were focusing on. That is why, when proceeding on doing the heuristic evaluation we agreed to consider ten key points as proposed by Jakob Nielsen and continue our evaluation according to them. These key points can be summarized as; 1) Visibility of system status meaning that the system should always keep users informed about what is going on at any given time and provide feedback, 2) Match between system and the real world that means the system should speak the user’s language rather than use system-oriented terms, 3) User control and freedom where the system should suggest paths that a user can take rather than make decisions for them, 4) Consistency and standards which means keeping the same language throughout the system, 5) Error prevention where the system prevents errors from occurring, 6) Recognition rather than recall that means to minimize the user’s memory load, 7) Flexibility and efficiency of use in order for both experienced and inexperienced users to be able to use the site, 8) Aesthetic and minimalist design, 9) Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors by showing error messages, 10) Help and documentation that will help the users understand how to do their tasks. The second problem we faced to which we found the solution more easily was to define a proto persona for the website. In order to solve this problem, we imagined the site’s ideal target group and characteristics it might share and came up with our persona, Vicky.
Skills we obtained
Through our heuristic evaluation we obtained valuable skills that helped us both as designers but as users as well. First of all, we understood the general concept of how a website should appear and work properly. Every aspect from how it should have an aesthetic and appealing design to how it should prevent errors is crucial for the best user experience. Undoubtedly, we also learned how to apply basic usability principles, UX Laws & heuristics during the design process and identify usability problems in a digital product so that they can be addressed as part of an iterative design process. Last but not least, this process helped us design better and look at things from the evaluator’s perspective and point of view and that is why the heuristic evaluation was such a valuable procedure.
Mobile app development
As an advertising agency, we were also asked to create an application for mobile phones, a small quiz of some questions with any topic we wanted. To create the quiz, we used the protoio application. This work was done individually so we could choose the best one for our client. We all chose different topics, others focused on cars, others on series, and others on movies, etc. Our registration in the application was very easy and fast. The use of the app is free for 15 days, so we didn’t have to pay for membership and the time we had was more than enough to finish the quiz. Before we were assigned the task we received a small tutorial on how this application works. We had a guide that helped us and showed us a small example of how the quiz will look like and also the steps we should follow. We received appropriate guidance and had the possibility of communicating via email with our guide for any questions. In general, the use of the application was quite easy after a little practice and the problems we had were minimal. The challenge of this project was to make the pages run one after the other by pressing the corresponding button, but also to display the correct and incorrect answers to the user. We used images and sounds to our advantage in order to create a perfect result with a well-researched content. Despite the difficulties, the result was excellent and left our client happy. During this process we had the possibility to combine the images with the sound and also to make a series of movements and commands through buttons so that the program would work properly. Overall it was a very pleasant and nice experience because we learned how to handle mobile apps and achieve an aesthetically pleasing result.
In summary, it is indisputable that our hard work, creative skills, and inventiveness in overcoming possible obstacles are the main keys that made the difference in each one of the projects we took over. Besides them and by taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by our combination with distinguished businesses and their professional, well trained, and cooperative members, we accomplished goals we couldn’t even imagine. Our whole experience developed the great potential for us to dream and work on a bigger Creativity Crew. In short, this means that our aim is to methodically increase our agency’s influence in the business sector as much as possible and become more and more popular for the unique way of working and thinking, predicting and facing difficulties and cooperating harmonically.
Website link: http://creativitycrew.tilda.ws/
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087196433910
Instagram Link: https://www.instagram.com/creativitycrew10/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D&fbclid=IwAR2jp3Yrs-EF6sGswyun1Sqap_5qyDFy2D0hQMkmQysHZH3mnV0iyubxj2s
Creativity Crew Members : Anastasia Tsatsouli , Irianna Oikonomou, Stavroula Liapi, Konstantinos Loukis, Anastasia Marnoutzidi
A Special Thank you to Ms. Betty Tsakarestou
