Coding is GREAT, but always room for design
One of my first live projects I started to work on at AgileVentures was a project called MetPlus which is a non-profit that aim to help the people of Detroit, and hopefully Michigan, to find a job that suits them.
I took a big step and started a feature that was a 2 pointer, hey nothing like jumping into the deep end now that I had finished bootcamp at Craft Academy and feeling quite confident I could take on the world of coding.
My task was to create a button that would download a person’s resume, sounds simple right for a newbie coder, well 3 days later after tackling every resource to try to get this right, I asked for help from one of our mentors Patrick, we paired up and all it took was 30min to get it working. “Sigh”
I can say this journey of learning to code is a very humbling experience, but still a very exciting one. So the lesson is not to give up how hard it may get.
The next task I took on was some UI design for MetPlus which as a designer I knew that I really could give back quickly and then get back into coding.
This is was the web application look liked before the facelift started, I think where I was quite fortunate is first getting to code on this project, I got to experience the application first hand and get a good understanding of all the roles of users who would be using this application.
From there I tackled the design of the home page giving it a more visual look and a clear message that each user role would understand what they would gain from this application, then the welcome message and the clear call to action for each user.
From there the about us page and contact us page created.
It was great to be part of this change for the MetPlus application and know that the site will give a better user experience and get more people using it when it goes live.
Now back to coding…
