A Creative Kind of Jam

Laurice Manaligod
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read

For the past few years, my Wednesday evenings have been taken up by dragon boat training with my team. I traded that for an intense night of design at the Adobe Creative Jams. After a series of events, I had the opportunity to team up with one of my good friends and former coworker.

We arrived at the Microsoft Vancouver Office just before 5pm. After settling in, and finding our spots, we’re given the theme of the Jam.

HOME? “Say whaa?!” — yes, with a question mark. And go! It was now up to us to convey the theme in the form of a mobile app.

Home is…

My teammate wrote “HOME?” on the centre of his notepad. To narrow our path, we thought of words we would associate with it. Family, sanctuary, and being away. We grabbed all the parts of our jigsaw, and narrowed our mind map to family, dog, and being away.

Frame the problem, find a need

Here’s the challenge, how to package these few words into the form of an app. Turning back to our map, we looked for a need to fulfill. My teammate looked back at how the few first days were like, as a first-time puppy owner, for him and his wife. It involved sleepless nights, and constant research from a range of sources.

We identified the challenges, and our users. Inspired by my teammate’s lifestyle, we defined our user as someone who’s busy, works a 9–5 job, relies on technology, and may often go out of town.

We broke down the app into three main areas:

  1. Build a habit
  2. Educate others
  3. Relieve anxiety

Our goal for our app is to first create a habit among our users. Doing so would enrich the growth of the app’s database of information which brings us to our second point, to educate others. These two hand in hand, would contribute to the third point, relieve anxiety. By having a community and a database of information, we hope to provide our owners with a sense of confidence to raise a puppy on their own and piece of mind to leave their pet with a sitter.

We knew that by having a good foundation, this sets us up for the second half of our time. We shifted our focus from paper to screen and started gathering facts for our app. We collected our data and started to construct user stories to present in the ninety seconds we’re given.

Now that we’ve framed the problem, identified our users, defined challenges, and constructed our user stories, we felt it was time to start diving into the design segment of our app. With one hour to go, we have yet to craft the interface, prototype, and pitch.

Putting the pieces together

I started wireframing the onboarding process while my teammate focused on compiling the style guide, which evolved until we were happy with how it translated onto the screens. We decided to give our app a voice and framed the information to be filled, in the form of a question. Giving our app a human touch.

We completed the onboarding screens, as well as two other alternate flows. Now to find a way to connect these flows. At this point we haven’t even started prototyping, and there was fifteen minutes left!

One of my challenges was to not panic at the sight of the clock. It’s quite daunting to see a large clock that counted down in front of us. At that moment, I realized how it might be like to participate in something like Project Runway. To create something totally from scratch within a matter of hours.

While I refined the UI, applied the style guide, and created the prototype, my teammate constructed the screen to link the two flows together.

We got this. Let’s go!

The last ten minutes was a blur. We compiled all our screens and made sure we covered all our bases. My teammate began write up the pitch while I prepped an outline of the flows. I transferred all the required files we needed, into a USB, had a final look and rushed to the front to submit our work.

After anxiously waiting for other participants to present their projects, we’re called up as the last time. It was extremely nerve wracking, as the last time I remembered standing in front of a large crowd of peers, with a mic, was in high school… to sing. Good thing this time was a speaking one, in front of a few hundred guests who are mostly professionals in our field.

It was an intense night to say the least, and even if we didn’t win, I’m so proud of our team and definitely grateful for a wonderful experience.


Huge thanks to Liz Schmidt for inviting us to Adobe Creative Jams and the staff of Microsoft Vancouver for having us in their awesome space and being gracious hosts.

To our friends and co-workers, thank you for coming out to support us! And of course, finally, thanks to my teammate Topp Brocales for being an amazing counterpart. Couldn’t have done this without you!

Laurice Manaligod

A design portfolio

Laurice Manaligod

Written by

Finding romance in the simplest moments. Musings from a designer and a new mom. http://laurice.manaligod.ca

Laurice Manaligod

A design portfolio

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