Work Placement: Kori Hanson

A personal account of a work placement with Layers Studio.

So following on from our last work placement post, Kori Hanson (great surname Kori) was also part of the same week as Andrew on his placement week with us, and was also given our Creative Fuse North East project as a brief for them to conduct a crazy sprint of a week on. I have to say, that Kori did great. Even though she had to miss a day due to work commitments (being a student is tough), she made up for the time outside of normal working hours.

Again, Kori did a great job and was a great ambassador for Newcastle College. The following is her personal account of her week with Layers.

On the first day at Layers we were taken on a tour of the studios and then given the brief. The brief was to design an app called GREEN PLACES. The World Health Organisation recently identified the benefits of improved accessibility and utilisation of green spaces, finding that they provide populations with improved mental health. Therefore our task was to design an app with the aim of making local green space information easily accessible to users. The app should not only allow the user to simply find locations, but also allow them to filter down their search to places more suitable for them;

eg. A dog walker is going to want different facilities to a mother.

I began this brief by doing some research into green spaces and apps with a similar purpose to the GREEN PLACES app; to see how their search function worked and how they filtered down their results. After researching I then created user stories and MoSCoW’ed them until I had my Minimal Viable Product. My MVP was an app that would allow users to search for green spaces by location or categorically; they would then be able to filter down their search results and view information about results.

On day 2 I worked from home. I planned the user journey of the app by creating swim lanes and flow charts. I also began thinking about the layout of my screens and what information would be on those screens by creating hand drawn wireframes.

I began the day 3 by finishing off my hand drawn wireframes. We then had a meeting with James to review our work so far; it was helpful to get feedback on how I could improve my wireframes and what would and wouldn’t work. I then began creating my digital wireframes using Sketch and made changes based on my feedback. When creating my wireframes I was advised to use material design elements; I think this improved my wireframes a lot, made them look more professional, and a lot quicker to create.I used Invision to create a prototype with my final wireframes; I had never previously used Invision and found that creating a prototype with it helped me to test my apps usability.

We began day 4 with another meeting to review our work so far; I got feedback that I needed to put more thought into how my search categories and filters were going to work. Therefore I did some more research into apps that use categories and filters to search, for instance, I looked at a lot of restaurant finder apps because they have a very similar purpose to the GREEN PPACES app. I then began my UI research; I looked at a lot of Behance projects to get some inspiration. After researching I created a style tile for my app and once I was happy with this I began adding the UI elements too my wireframes/prototype. At the end of the day we had another meeting to see how our UI was going. At this point I was not very happy with my UI and therefore James gave me some advise on how to improve it, such as, thinking about how the buttons will look when they are idle compared to when they are activated and how to make sure a user knows that an object can be selected/deselected etc. He advised me to look at Google Material and Glue (BBC UX/UI Guide) which I found useful.

I spent the final morning finalising my design and making sure my prototype was working ready to present.

I think my presentation went well, although I think next time I come to present a piece of my work I will make sure I plan what I am going to say before I go in. Overall, I think this week went well and I have enjoyed it. I have taken a lot from my time at Layers, for instance, I now know what it is like to work in an industry environment and how much faster the work pace is. It was also helpful getting feedback from James about my work and learning new design techniques.

Thanks again to Kori, she really did do a great job and Im glad she has found the process worthwhile.

More to follow soon on Green Places, we are still putting the prep work in before kicking things off proper, but we are really excited about it, and will certainly be reviewing our notes from the week with Kori and Andrew.

Stay Tuned…