Skills Week: Learning how Digital Skills help run a business
If I could summarise what I learnt over the course of CareerContact’s Skills Week: the core digital skills involved in running a business are applicable even in everyday life.
The CareerContact Pilot Programme was conducted over seven weeks in November and December 2020. In the first week, students were exposed to User Experience Research (UX), User Interface Design (UI), Low/No-code web development and Digital Marketing; with one topic covered each day. Every day involved blended learning — students completed an online task before taking a deeper dive into the topic with an industry mentor.
Day 1 — User Experience
Putting things simply, user experience is all about the different stages a firm goes through to come up with a product that serves the users’ needs. We began with the Double Diamond Design framework consisting of the phases undergone to come up with good UX (Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver).
- Discover: Carrying out good UX research to understand the user’s needs via self-report methods such as surveys or interviews.
- Define: Consolidating the information retrieved through the interview (via affinity mapping) followed by the creation of user personas + effective ‘how might we’ (HMW) statements.
- Develop: Understanding the customer journey alongside the HMW statement and coming up with an idea.
- Delivery: Devising deliverables while prioritising the ideas/ features + user flow diagram + a Lo-Fi prototype.
I decided to improve on the Notability application since I had friends who had complained to me about the inability to organize notes in the application. Hence, using the user interviews, I came up with my affinity mapping which included both positive and negative aspects of the application.
Using consumer personas I had made for the application (secondary-university students), I realized that the inability to organise notes does compromise the usability of the application. These students might need to be able to categorize and group notes to their various needs which may not be satisfied with just two layers of categorizing.
This brought me to my HMW statement and finally my idea: the creation of customisable books. I was also able to come up with the Lo-Fi version of my application after completing the new user journey map.
Day 2 — User Interface
User Interface consists of both functionality and aesthetics. When designing a product, it is important to place certain aspects in a well thought out manner while having other visual features to make the product look visually pleasing too. There were two phases to doing this: defining the information architecture and visual design.
- Information architecture: Coming up with a good way to categorise the content in the product which would be easy to navigate and use
- Visual design: Highlighting certain aspects of the product while making sure it conveys a clear message about the brand.
This was the day I realised that we had to submit a website as the last deliverable of the week so I changed my focus from Notability to having my very own fictitious baking classes. I found laying out the information architecture of the website to be a real challenge. It took me a while before I was able to finish, the tree jacking took an especially long time. Eventually, however, both card sorting and tree jacking really helped in Day 3. Of course, the day ended with creating a working wireframe on Figma, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Day 3 — Building a no-code website
I had the opportunity to use all that I had learned on Day 2 — from the front end to the back end, as well as the website elements. I found it especially interesting to learn about the importance of landing pages which I previously had never taken note of.
In the end, I made my very own bakery website on Wix.com. Having a good tree jacking really helped since the information was well planned out. At the end of the day, I realised that e-commerce shops worked better on Squarespace. So I started remaking the website on Squarespace instead.
Day 4 — Marketing
The main takeaways from this day included:
- Marketing concepts (customer segmentation and profile, competitor analysis and value proposition)
- Learning about SEO and keywords
- Google Analytics
It is necessary to set ourselves apart from others in terms of values while keeping in mind the target audience. Choosing the right keywords is also important to get good website traffic.
Day 5 — Deliverables
Presentation day had arrived. I realised that I was slightly nervous to present over Zoom but it all went well. I received feedback on how to improve the website and realised that I had come a long way in terms of digital skills. Although there was much information crammed into a week, I enjoyed the process nonetheless.
CareerContact is an ed-tech platform designed to bridge the gap between school and work. We help students develop digital skills and connect them with SMEs in Southeast Asia. Feel free to reach out to us at CareerContact.cc or check out our courses on Thinkific.
