Time for teamwork!
Going to the last phase of the class makes me excited about finally having an opportunity to work with my awesome peers in the class. After reading my peers their work for two months, I learned a lot from their work both what kind of designers they are and the skills they have. I was assigned to a group with Blessing, Erika, and Yixun for the group project, which made me really excited to learn from them and also to see what kind of skills I can bring to the team as someone out of IDM.
Get to know the team
We followed the team charter that we started to build team values and talk about our expectations. Four of us come from pretty diverse backgrounds: Blessing and I both have journalism backgrounds but with very different focuses of major — Blessing majored in magazine writing while I have a focus in data journalism; Erika has solid knowledge in UX research as well as visual design, and she is a coder too; Yixun’s undergraduate major is a graphic design that all of us were amazed by his wonderful portfolio that showcases his research and visual design skills. Even though our backgrounds are different, we all landed somewhere about UX and digital interfaces that we are really interested in — all of us want to present this project in our portfolio in a visually appealing and professional way.
Our team values
We also talked about team values and expectations as well. A team that is supportive, efficient and collaborative is something that all of us are looking for — this enables us to have open mindsets of accepting mistakes and learning from each other. We also want our design to be inclusive and accessible that we really think about the problems we are trying to solve for the users: to make this happen, we each will do research from different angles and offer initial solutions to solve the problem with their rationales and reasoning; and as a team, we shall be very open about each other’s ideas and try to come up with a final solution that “steals” the good parts of each person's ideas.
Ways to communicate
During the team meeting, we mentioned coordinating and designating weekly meetings or brainstorming sessions that all of us can work together either in person or on Zoom to work on the project collaboratively. We haven’t figured out the best way to designate the group meetings yet because everyone’s schedule is different, but this can be solved once we start to work on the projects. Our main way to communicate is Slack — I think I would offer to my team if they prefer to use Slack or Discord (I just found out there is a Discord channel for IDM, maybe IDM students are more comfortable with Discord).
Tools and skillset
When we talked about obstacles, one thing that I mentioned to the team is that we might not have the skills that are “required” to make our prototype, which all my teammates agree on. However, all of us have an open mind on this that we can learn if we really need it for our design, or we can always find substitutions if we do not have enough time. Even though we do not know about the project yet, we also talked about the tools we used to make User interface and web design prototypes. I personally love Figma for its functionality and how it is teamwork-friendly, and we might use it for our brainstorming session (FigJam) and actual prototype design (Figma) — of course, we don’t know what we are supposed to work on yet, we will find it out soon.
Reflections
I think I “suffered” a lot for the first half of the class — it’s not that I don’t like the assignments, but the fact that my handcrafting skills are just not really well-polished that made me pretty anxious about finishing the homework best of what I can. Now I am getting more excited to learn from my peers and their approaches in solving a problem, in addition to their presented work. SO, WHAT ARE WE DESIGNING FOR REAL?
