Summer Internship’17 by Nest Collective, week #1

Hi guys!

Although we’re already beginning our third week here at Nest Collective’s 2017 Summer Internship, this is our first blog post!

First of all, we would like you to meet our team. This year we have two designers, Sara and Rúben, and two developers, Dinis and Tomás.

Now that we got that out of the way, let us tell you what we’ve been up to in these last two weeks.

On the first week we’ve had a ton of amazing workshops which were lectured to us by developers and designers that work for the Nest Collective based companies.

We had workshops on Developing Processes, Design Principles, Android Development, UX, Ruby on Rails, Automated Testing, Responsive Design, React, HTML5, CSS, Sass and more! Although there was a lot to learn in such a short time, our mentors were kind enough to give us some cool resources and presentations that we can refer to during the development phase.

On the second week, our mentors gave us the project idea: We had to create a product that guides people into the tech business, and we started our design sprint!

It all started when our mentors were interviewing possible candidates for the internship. They noticed that some candidates didn’t have a very deep knowledge on the area and of which skills and processes were requested on the tech industry. Having that in mind, our mentors asked us to create an application that would somehow solve this problematic.

During this week we filled our room walls with post-its and drawings, conducted interviews, did some mockups and filled whiteboards with ink.

We started by drawing stakeholders maps, value maps and positioning matrices. With the stakeholders map we determined who is going to be our project stakeholders and who would be our target public for the application: Users who want to learn more about the tech market. The value map helped us figure out which were the main objectives and the value that we wanted to offer our users. With our positioning matrix we concluded that we wanted to offer guidance to our users by pointing them to the technological areas where they would fit better and to courses and tutorials in those specific areas.

On the second day of the design sprint, we interviewed a potential user of our application to try to understand what motivates someone to change their career to the tech world.

We wrote our app Problem Statement, defined our Golden Path and also wrote our first survey, as we felt the need to interview more potential users and gather more info about the challenges and difficulties they feel or felt when changing careers.

We started our third day by doing some crazy eights. We followed it up by doing the Storyboard Sketching and working on a low-fi prototype, where we defined our main views and discussed some possible layouts for the views.

At the end of the day we shared our survey and got more than 100 replies in one day.

On the fifth day we had a small talk with Mário from Redlight, where we shared with him what are our biggest technical concerns.

At the end of the day, we looked at all this week’s work and started to trim the edges of our rough idea and designed our first low-fi prototype.

Friday — the last day of the design sprint, we asked some of our friends and co-workers that we thought that could’ve find this idea interesting to come to our room at the Nest Collective and test our prototype. We did this testing in teams of two and recorded all the testers interactions with the prototype, which really helped us uncover some issues and important conclusions about our work.

Hopefully, this will help us create a more user-friendly and intuitive platform for our users.

After all the crazy 8’s, all the interviews, all the wireframes and all the hard work we were rewarded with a welcoming party! We officially introduced ourselves and our project to the whole Nest Collective crew and discussed a little bit our process. We also took this chance to gather opinions about what we’ve been working on.

The evening followed with a Fernando Pessoa vs Gustavo Santos game (and what a wild game!), some “chouriça assada” and pizza and lots of fun!