VCD

Typically, I've found design more interesting when I'm working on websites, UX, information architecture, and emerging technology like AR. So when the prospect of doing traditional graphic design was looming, I can't say it wasn't a daunting project. I haven't had much experience with Photoshop before so I jumped into the deep end on this one. I was relived by the fact that the first 3 weeks of the class were structured so well. For some reason I really enjoyed the challenges we did in class, and having a set deadline every day for a poster challenged me so much – in a good way. As a learner, I really benefit from constraints, because I sometimes find it hard to limit my choices down. The first exercise we did where we took Pictionary drawings was an awesome start to the class, and I found the lecturers every week really good because they explored a range of different styles – from very simple to messy & photographic grunge. I also found the exercise where we wrote down all of the objects or tangible things (buildings, briefcase, tie) down and made posters from that.

In the second half of the course I struggled a lot more – none of the ideas that I presented in my interim were sticking, they were all quite flat vector styles and all used black white and red, it was hard for me to develop them into more impactful posters, so I explored a range of different ideas in week 4 5 and 6, until eventually landing on my final two – one of which was a development of one of my interim posters and the other was somewhat of a development from a previous poster, which didn't suit the business theme.

Thoughtout the course the things I've learnt are to be succinct – not nesserily simple, but to keep the message super clear. I've learnt that I actually really enjoy having constraints and due dates set, and I was able to get a lot more done in class than any other subject. While it wasn't so much about user experience, I think what I learnt was a really valuable lesson in capturing people's attention, and moving them to act with clear, impactful messaging and a strong call to action. I'm really happy with my final posters, after struggling in week 4 and 5 to come up with something more clear and more suitable for the business theme I was going for, I think both of my posters have a strong message while being quite different styles.

I wanted to highlight just how unequal the workplace for women is, by using the quote that “there’s more CEOs named John that all female CEOs” which shows the extent of the issue. The way I aimed to illustrate my poster (the Ihi) was to try and show how women might feel being such a minority in the workforce – surrounded and powerless – by the sheer number of men around them. I’ve done this in both posters by showing a direct comparison between the number of women and Johns. On one hand, the first poster illustrates a city packed full of Johns, but doesn’t literally illustrate the fact their names are John – it’s meant to be more intimidating using repeated photography of men to let the viewer unpack the message themselves (Wehi). The 2nd is more direct, and I’ve used scale to show the powerful size of men in relation to the scaled down ‘Kate’ as a tie clip. I’ve also repeated the “John” as the silhouette for the tie, teasing that the industry is built from, and made for men – a common theme across both posters. – 193 words

Today in class I showed my two posters to people and asked them to choose between the list of all of my posters, and thankfully for the most part people enjoyed the posters which I chose last week– probably in part thanks to the brightly colored backgrounds which popped more. The biggest bit of feedback I got however was that my cityscape poster just looked like rectangles to people, rather than a city. So I spent the rest of class and this afternoon working on making the cityscape render like a real skyline. I thought rather than just choosing any old skyline I'd pick a recognizable New Zealand one, and I thought Auckland is probably the best pick, thanks to the skytower.

I also had double ups of some figures in my original and wanted to use new headshots, so these are the ones I've settled on for the most part. After doing the skyline, and showing it to people they definitely got the metaphor much stronger, and liked the concept. I still think it needed work, so I tried out different colours and typographic styles:

After being pretty stoked with the last poster in orange, I wanted to give the photography/emotional poster one more revision – I still wasn't happy with how punk rock my poster was looking, but definitely liked the photographic figures aesthetic. I started brainstorming about what makes a really emotive poster – digging deeper than that, I want the viewer to feel intimidated, like they're the women in the company surrounded in a world of men. Something that was a common theme for me with posters that were somewhat intimidating were eyes. Photos of eyes – for whatever reason – really give me a sense of the person looking into my soul, but I wanted to amplify that feeling. What if I stacked up multiple mens eyes – how would that look?

The source images are referenced here and were all labeled as "noncommercial reuse" on google images or Flickr

https://www.dnscorporatephotography.co.uk/corporate-headshots-portrait-photog

https://www.globalnpo.org/FR/Ajaccio/1455145528112643/Entreprendre-Pour-Apprendre-Corsica---EPA-Corsica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rod_Black_2014_Headshot.jpg

https://lightandshine.com/business-photography-makes-good-business-headshot/

https://andygreenwell.com/portfolio/business-headshots-photography/

https://newdayrisk.com

https://developingdesigns.blogspot.com/p/photography-portraits.html

https://www.tobiaskey.com/business-headshots/

Today in class we wrapped up VCD for the year in what was an awesome showcase of everyone’s work. Super proud of the work I’ve done this year and I thought this project was a great way to wrap it all up. I was nervous going into a group project but I actually ended up loving working with Louie and found we work collaborate really well together. It's fun to look back at our first attempt and how much it changed since our first ideas – a fish going up river, then a boy with a tree in a completely different style, then to land on what we have as Tipu. I think the best part of this project is just how much time Louie and I spent working on it together, we definitely wouldn't have got this result we're proud of without heaps of out of class time and I'm really happy we were both on the same page in terms of that.

It's now Saturday, and I'm trying something else just to see if I could push my ideas a bit further and get a more emotional response – as you see from the posters below, I've asked many many people in class, friends, and family and everyone has a different favorite. So do I! At this stage, I was leaning towards the 2nd tie-made-of-johns poster and the new yellow collage style one, but I've since had some feedback from people. To some, the yellow poster is seen as too "punk rock" – like a ting tings album cover, also it looks quite fashionable rather than corporate which isn't what im going for.

So I tried re-creating the suit-tie one with the tie made of Johns with a nicer look

Today we've just been organizing the printing for our poster and sorting out the final bits for the animation and website which are due on Tuesday and Thursday. Over the weekend Louie and I also decided to play around with different fonts we could use rather than Tiempos, the serif we were using before which was getting mixed reviews from people we showed it to. In the end we decided on using a font called "mathletic" because it mimicked the hand drawn style we were going for and people liked it a lot better.

We we're super happy with our music from previous weeks but we'd been prioritizing finishing other things before looking at changing audio, and we did have a bit of time so we tried out a bunch of different songs. In the end we actually did find one we liked a lot better: "Harvest Moon" by poolside which is a cover of Neil Young's original track. We both think it works a lot better than the badly looped track we were using before.

Today we had our interim and it was *awesome* to be able to see other people's work and to get some meaningful feedback on our work. Overall it seemed like our animation and website were really strong, but our poster didn't really look as visually consistent to the other 2 as the drawings weren't the same. Overall the poster seemed to lack impact compared to other people in our class and we were told our typeface wasn't the greatest – but overall we were pretty stoked with all the positive feedback.

One thing Jason mentioned was that a lot of the animations seemed to be "like a play" where characters come into the scene and leave the scene just like a play would, but some of the animations moved the camera in different angles and kept the viewer interested all the way along – thankfully Jason mentioned to me that our one did a good job of not being like the former (which funnily was a big reason we decided to ditch the original animation)

Overall we're in really good shape for next week and I'm looking forward to making the finishing touches across the animation, motion graphic and poster – but the poster is definitely the thing we need to work on most.

After having our interim, I was really impressed by other's work in the class, and less so with the work I was presenting. It was still flat, and didn't resonate any emotional response. So I went back to the drawing board, aiming to create a more emotional poster that really pops and catches the eye. From what I saw in our interim, the best way to do that was to use photography and faces. The best posters I saw were also very simple, and had a very clear message.

In my research, I found a couple posters that were quite emotive to me:

The first image features many versions of a man who can only be described as douchbag looking, he's the type of guy you do not want as your boss. He looks annoying and sleazy and there's many multiples of him. What a nightmare. The other poster, on the right, really stood out to me as I was scrolling through Pinterest. I'm not usually into collage, but this stood out to me because of the typography and the emotion of the figure – she looks pissed off. In fact, the two posters look pretty apt together...

I also tried a version playing with lego mini-figures as they're a pretty recognizable identifier and their color makes them pop, and I thought it could be a great way to illustrate the idea that there's a sea of Johns, with hardly any individuality or differing perspectives. I wasn't as happy with the outcome however, it doesn't illicit the emotional response I'm really going for, but definitely does catch the eye – a worthwhile exploration.

Going into this project, my goals of it were to improve the user experience of finding information about electives for current and prospective Massey students. I also wanted to make it extremely easy and rewarding to upload feedback about the course – and that was definitely the biggest challenge I faced.

One of my other personal goals for the project was to have a live website that people can use and I can properly test with – I tried prototyping with Figma and XD and because of the lack of real world data for the feedback and upload process, it wasn’t very convincing. In the end, I was able to create a working site, which helped my design and testing process immensely. I was able to thoroughly test my upload process and get real user reactions because of the multiple different rabbit holes you could go down, rather than a prototype which has a set path.

It was definitely one of the most challenging projects I’ve worked on to date because of the complexity of the data involved too. I had to scrape course information from the Massey website which included course data and information and photos about lecturers. In testing I realised that I needed individual photos related to each elective which massey didn’t have. I figured in the end that I could simply scrape free to use images from google by using the elective title as the search name.

In our final week, I was very happy to do testing with students and hear feedback like “Is massey using thing?” and “Is this real? When can I start using it?” – which is always the best feedback to get. It’s not the flashiest design style, but I purposely went with a simple and easy to navigate site, and focused on the UX experience – although I am personally quite pleased with the way the UI came out. In my final testing, people rarely got lost or had to ask me questions.

I’m also very glad I limited the scope of the project from the outset – my target audience was just Massey COCA students, and the information was only about electives. As I improve the site through the coming weeks, I’d like to increase the scope of the project and I already have a bunch of ideas – such as including core classes, introducing pathways and possible careers, and generally having more information regarding what happens throughout a student’s time at Massey – I also would definitely include an area and system on the site for lecturers to upload content about their course – but for the scope of this project have focused on the student experience first and foremost.

Looking back, I’m very grateful I took a long time to figure out the UX of the site and do a lot of user testing with classmates and 3rd years upstairs. It really helped mould what the site has become and I wouldn’t have as good as a result without that testing and feedback. For example, one person told me they’d love to see other students blogs all in one place because they spend a tonne of time scraping tumblr looking for student examples. Another student gave the extremely valuable feedback that digging up images of their work could slow down the UX and be a painful process since often students move old projects to hard drives – so by allowing both blog uploads and photo uploads during the quiz, I get the best of both worlds – students who have blogs can upload them easily, and students without can still upload a photo if they have they stored locally and ready to go, if they feel like it.

I’m also so grateful for the flexibility of my lecturers to allow me to do this project. It’s something that really pushed me creatively and skills/tooling wise and I’m very appreciative of that allowance. It was very cool to see it come together and to work with friends and peers on their feedback and creating something from a student’s point of view. I’m very excited for whatever comes of the project and hope to continue to develop it throughout the rest of the year. It’s currently live right now at electives.webflow.io as a fully responsive site, with the upload/quiz flow working and I’ll be putting it into beta during the 6 week break to continue to collect feedback and impressions on it. Thank you!

PS: Rather than doing a fully functioning Figma design file, I opted to code the entire site which is what worked best for me in my workflow. There is still some functionality in the Figma as I was testing some flows. Please feel free to poke around the site, it's pretty much fully functional and responsive. It's live at www.electives.webflow.io

Louie and I have been working really hard over the weekend and have come up with a plan that's put us back in a really good place. We've got a great animation coming along and a sweet workflow where I draw frames and louie colours them in, which means we've been able to work really quickly.

We've also sorted out the website to a place we're really really happy with. Rather than having the animation on the website as we originally did, we've decided to have smaller little animations that show freeze frames from the animation which will animate on scroll. We also decided to combine the about warren page, about bats and the directors word into one page, since these days it's pretty rare for people to click through multiple pages, they'd rather just scroll.

The poster is also coming along really nicely, and I think across the board we're looking really cohesive with our brand image. It's been really good being able to work on everything together rather than delegate jobs because things stay consistent looking and we're both able to input ideas at the same level.

For the past couple day's we've been working hard on our new idea and I feel like we're in a pretty good place at this point. We've got a good color scheme and a drawing style we really like, so now it's just a matter of executing it. We know we've got a lot of work ahead of us, but we're a lot more happy with this idea, so we're happy to run with it. This week we're working on getting a proper flow and storyboard for the animation and to actually start producing a lot of frames. We've also got a bunch of poster ideas which we;'ve got feedback that look a bit childish.

We also have been working on our website wireframes and we mocked up a bit more of a detailed version on Figma which means we can both work on it at the same time which seems to work really well for us.

Since our last class on Thursday I've been thinking a lot about the upload process of the website because I've developed the floating side panel next to each course, offering a call to action to upload their work, but I haven't figured out exactly what that page might look like, until now. Originally I had planned to just have a dropdown of courses, which the student could select their elective, and then upload their blog link immediately after rating the course. However, in my user testing I found this wasn't as effective as I would have hoped. People weren't exactly sure where that button would take them, if it was off the page or not, and there was definitely a sense of "what's in it for me?" The user experience also wasn't great, in having a dropdown and just straight up asking for the link without offering a compelling reason why.

I also got great feedback from a lecturer who told me to look into my stars rating system a bit deeper. He offered the viewpoint that there are some lecturers at the school who are very hard on students, and can come across as mean at the time, causing students to potentially give the class a bad rating. He asked his class of fourth years whether they enjoyed the Type core at 100 level at the time, and everyone remarked how their lecturer was very hard on them, but the fundamental skills they learnt in the class were undeniable. 

I was thinking about a rating system involving a tinder-like swiping system, where students could quickly get through a bunch of different questions by swiping left or right on yes or no questions. This design aimed to game-ify the upload processStill, there was no answer for the ‘what’s in it for me’ question. It was more like a glorified survey rather than something that offered a 'why am I doing this?' – still, it helped me form my next ideas.

Until I had a realization – I asked myself, how can I make surveys fun, sure. But most importantly what motivated people to do surveys. What kind of surveys are motivating? I realized a lot of friends of mine seem to love quizzes on facebook where they help identify personality traits, all for just answering simple questions (they also collect and sell that data in a non transparent way, but that’s another rant). In these quizzes, as thanks for letting us collect all this personal information on you, we'll show you your personality trait. Adobe actually just had one of these, and roped me into doing it! https://mycreativetype.com

It made me realize I actually do have something valuable to offer students, using the power of algorithms: personalized recommendations on which courses to take. Since students are likely on this website selfishly to look into future electives, I could play into that motivation. I could kill two birds with one stone, offering students questions which I could use in an algorithm to narrow down potential matches for future courses they should take, while also collecting information about how much the student enjoyed their last course. 

‍Outcomes

‍This lead to two outcomes I’m really happy with. The first is the new rating/upload flow. It asks 5 simple questions of students. 

Select 3 tags or ‘categories’ which relate to the course

Did they enjoy the course? Y/N

Did the lecturer teach the course well? Y/N

Did you learn a valuable new skill? Y/N

What is your blog link? 

The last one, what is your blog link is the most valuable one, as students have told me they value that information above even photography of the course, because it allows them to see what the course is like, week by week, as well as seeing not just the finished product, but the development along the way.

The second outcome related to the upload flow, is a new section in the course page with a working title: ‘stats’ which shows students the answers to these questions from previous students. They take the data that students have answered, and anonymously add them up to indicate important information to prospective students at a place. For example, 47% of students were glad they took the course.

‍Removals

In this process, I’ve removed the questions and answers section – why? – simply put, in user testing students told me it would turn them off if they had a question they had to really think about (even if it was only a tweet length answer.) Also, when doing my sorting cards game with two separate groups of 4, they both put questions and answers in the bottom 75% of information heighracy, ie what they would care about most on a page about a prospective elective.

‍I also removed the star-based rating system, in favor of the new stats section. This relates back to my earlier user feedback where one lecturer (and his class) mentioned a great point to me about students giving a harsh rating because they didn’t like a lecturer or thought they were too harsh, when in reality they did learn a valuable new skill – this new system breaks those data points up so it’s easier for other students to see what is good about the course and what isn’t – so if the lecturer is eh but the course material is great, they can make a decision based on that, rather than just seeing a pretty vague star number. 

‍I’ve also removed photo upload – in my testing I found that students told me they routinely move their work onto hard drives or cloud storage after they’re done the course, and since I would only be getting visitors to the website during periods like the 6 week break and summer break, this is a period where they would likely not have their source files or images on hand and ready to upload. I’ve been told by almost every student I’ve talked to that they would be far more likely to link to their blog, which they have available and in some cases memorized, rather than connecting their hard drive, transferring the files over, opening the files, exporting images of the finals and uploading. Especially when in most cases that work is already on their blogs anyway. I also had feedback in my two sorting tests that students preferred blogs over photos of work, since they could see the development, and they didn’t mind having to open multiple blogs for each course they were looking into, since they ask 3rd years to see their blogs anyway, or try and google them by themselves.

Summary

Overall I’m really happy with this work, but it will definitely be down to testing it - especially the questions I’m asking and the friction in the blog upload section. But I’m quite confident that once they see there is benefit for themselves, and they’re helping other students it will motivate them rather than just having the latter. One thing I think might need work is the interactivity of the survey questions, the great thing about the buzz feed and adobe quizzes is that they offer you answer buttons that are unique to who you might be, and while they serve the same Y/N purpose, it makes the user feel like "Hey! They're really getting to know me!" when they ask questions like are you an introvert or extrovert? Are you the person against the wall of the party or talking to everyone? My questions so far are just yes or no, but I did experiment using a multi choice answer, which I'll test tomorrow at uni.

‍

I’ve also updated the CTA on each individual course page, but the copy needs tweaking for sure. Time to sleep!

‍

Since our last class, I walked away wanted to create a more emotive poster than the last

To avoid the problem of having no content on the page at all if students hadn’t left comments I want to use data that's already available for each course. I talked to students who said they would be more likely to leave feedback of some sort if there was basic data about the course already filled out.

To do this, I looked at the data that we already have about each course, provided by both the yellow booklet, and the Massey website:

• Name
• Description
• Semesters
• Course code
• Subject
• Credit amount
• Level
• Lecturer name
• Course costs
• Prerequisites
  

So, I decided to use that data that was already provided by the school, because I had tested and found out that students would be more likely to write feedback about a course that had some structure, like a name, bio, and lecturers. Plus, this means that the site is still useful to students even if there’s no comments from students – which is actually a huge part of getting feedback in the first place – because people actually need to use the damn thing. Plus, I’d be stupid to not use data that’s already available about a course.

After speaking with lecturers about the course feedback piece, they mentioned that the Call to Action to leave feedback about the course may not be enticing enough – and that maybe I should test a version where there’s some sort of super-easy rating method. I decided on using stars, as do popular book and food review websites

Feedback on V3:

– Stars might not be a good rating system, for some lecturers who are hard-ass, they might get a bad rating, when in reality their course was really useful – In v4 I will test with ‘I would recommend this course’

– The image that is in the course description section looks nice, but isn’t cohesive with the rest of the site, there aren’t other images with bounding boxes cut off – will remove this image in v4, because the reality is that most courses won’t even have 1 image, let alone 2

– “Choose your tomorrow” heading is too vague – will change to “Find your next elective”

– Feedback system still isn’t very compelling, hard to know what that button does “will it take me off this page or not?” – need to make it more clear what the CTA will do, and maybe make it stand out more visually, but will do more user testing to validate this

I wanted to design the site fully, filters and all, because I planned to build it to user test the upload process. Give the website to friends and 3rd & 4th years and see how it works out for them. Then go back and interview them.

My big problem that I need to solve now is the flow for getting students to upload work, and what would be motivating and encourage organic growth, without lecturers asking them to upload their work. That’s why I made the system of leaving a random anonymous comment, or uploading the blog link, or uploading the brief. I was given feedback by students that uploading a photo of the work would be a lot more effort than uploading the blog link.

I need to design the upload page, and start user testing. My current idea is to game-ify the upload process – something like tinder or a UI where you can answer a question, then either be done, or request another question. And the slight issue with this, since it requires input fields and actual work to be done, I sort of have to build it to test it. If I showed someone an upload field and asked them if they would upload a photo they might say “sure ill do that” but there’s a difference between them saying that, and them actually trying to dig out the photo from their hard drive and upload it.

I’ve been looking quite a bit about actually implementing this, and getting peoples opinions on the best way it could work. In my exploration I have gotten feedback from students and lecturers it might be really useful if the lecturer emailed students a link for them to fill out – other students have told me they ignore school emails. I need to clarify whether or not this goes against the rules of my brief which is “small action, big impact” and whether or not that means the site isn’t made by students, for students.

I assumed my challenge was “whatever it takes to get students to upload work” – whether it be by lecturers prompting them, or by their own doing. I would hope that I can do anything as long as the student recognises that their small action will have a big impact, and I want to design something that will work, not something that sounds good in theory and falls on its face in practice. Those details still need to be worked out with my lecturer.

From our last formal interim a lot of people gave me feedback that the tie poster comprised of John letterforms was their favorite, but I also got a lot of feedback that people still loved my original 'Hello my name is' poster and that I should definitely explore that one again. What I decided to do was to try and merge the two of them to see what that might look like. Above you can see my explorations. Originally I tried making the 'KATE' letterform stand out more and look like a tie clip and having the copy become more visible – which were the two main points of feedback for this poster.

After exploring that, I decided to try and merge the ideas from both posters into one. Rather than having so much black negative space (which a lot of people told me reminded them more of 50 shades of grey) I used the suit illustration from my previous posters.

I also incorporated a more stand-out tie clip motif for the name KATE in smaller letterforms.

Overall, people seemed to like this poster better than the original black background one – I'm still not sure.

I also went back to the chair poster because that was the one poster from the interim that I really believed in the concept but the execution just wasn't there. The idea behind it was to show how the position at the top is reserved for John – and I tried to make the chair in the original (top left) look like a throne, but people didn't understand. So with these posters I've tried to experiment with taking them more literally. Still, I don't think the message I was trying to portray was coming through, but people seemed to like these explorations even still. Many attributed it with a 'man men' style which is what I was going for.

I tried playing with the idea of a repeated man silhouette with one stand out woman jumping in the air, but it was hard to get what I was looking for, so I moved on. I found the above poster by amnesty international and loved the idea behind it and thought it would translate really well to the whole repeated johns idea. The poster in the top right is what I settled on for one of my interim concepts – I like how simple it, while still having a super strong message, as if the suit is the corporation and the suit is made of johns.

One of the words I wrote down this week after our exercise in class was skyscraper, because I feel that emphasizes CEOs and corporations really well for people, it's a good metaphor. One thing I explored early on was cross sections, as a kid I adored Richard scarry picture books where you can see the inner workings of a factory or ship, and once I saw some of the photographs of silhouettes it instantly reminded me of them. It made me think what if instead of regular people, I used silhouettes of men in suits in corporate office building, and there was only one woman silhouette

I think this poster is my favorite, I feel like the Wehi is strong – as a viewer you can imagine yourself as the woman is a whole building full of men, and the quote really backs that up. The quote is based on the NZX50 where the only female is the CEO of Chourus. I also like it for the Richard scarry reasons I mentioned earlier.

Final throne poster – pretty happy with this but would like to develop it at some point, I think it could be better because right now the message isn't really clear. The Ihi is the throne at the top of the company is reserved for John, but I'm not sure the Wehi will strike the same way.

Tried different typographic layouts and I was pretty happy with the last one (bottom right) but it felt a bit flat and boring. Originally I went for the theme of a word find but thought this was nicer looking. My only struggle with it is that it doesn't really relate to business, but I'm not convinced that's actually 100% necessary anyway.

In the end, I found a great image of men at a football game, and used them as an image behind the text to give more of an emotive feeling to this poster, which – until I did it – I thought of as my weakest. I actually really quite like how this one turned out – it's a bit different to the flatness of the others, it's more textural and dynamic.

Today in class we started working on our new concept we starting working on in Thursday's class – we're feeling good about this one, it's a lot more straightforward, visually interesting and tells the meaning behind the story better. Our old animation felt very flat and a lot like a stage with no moving camera angles – and it was looking like it was going to be very long, much longer than we would've liked. We decided to pair it back and it a lot more visually interesting – so that we could use it as an advertisement for social media.

Over the weekend louie worked on creating textures and colours while I worked on figuring out the workflow for how we'll make the animation going forward.

I assumed we'd be using adobe animate, which is like the modern version of flash which was great for frame-by-frame animation back in the day. In class I asked some other friends who are doing similar styles & workflows to us what they're using – one team was using photoshop and another using an iPad app. Since I've got an iPad I decided the workflow would be easier to do there.

We also leant into the hand drawn style that we were using for wireframes on the iPad because people told us they loved the look of them – so louie tried different colour variations and we ended up really liking the yellow background version shown here

This week in class we started playing with visual style – I went for a pretty conservative look that uses background colors over images to produce a clean style that’s easy to read and scan – I originally went with Massey’s classic yellow color just for the elective page. I thought this was nice, but friends of mine weren’t so sure. I tried it with both purple and blue and they much preferred the blue color. I was still enjoying yellow.

My brochure aims to help stall owners figure out which market in Wellington is a good fit for them.
The problem is, there isn’t enough local guides like this for those who run food trucks & stands. I remember reading Richard Scarry as a kid and loved to see what everyone was doing from above, so I wanted to recreate that feeling. Isometric illustration offers a vantage point that you couldn’t capture otherwise – the scale, & perspective to see everything at a glance. The colours are saturated to mimic the feel of a playful video game – and to show the expression of each market. The amount of people in each scene represents the feelings of those markets – relaxed, crowded or breathable. My data visualisations helps stall owners know exactly when the right time is to set up a stall at the market is, and roughly how much they could make.

After doing some user testing, I got feedback from students that the design was much harder to scan through than the previous version – so I tried to mix things up between both of those two versions. I experimented with the more organized structure, while including student comments. This worked out much better – it solved the problem of needing students to answer so many questions

In our final week, I was working on ironing out details and making sure everything looks good to print. I added more details to the underground spread, like adding the items that people were selling on the tables, and I changed the hue of the concrete to be slightly more purple. I also added a bunch more people to the harbourside spread and the night markets, and I added more detail to the lanterns on the nightmarket spread.

Overall I'm really happy with the work I produced, if I had more time I'd make every character unique so in each spread, so you could analyse and really spend some time looking at the spreads. I also struggled with printing my bookwork out, since we don't have a printer at my flat like I did last year at home. For our next assignment I'll either move my workbook online or spend a good couple hours at the end of each week sticking things in my book. This term was very action packed for me though, and it was hard to manage both my elective and VCD, plus CCC with everything that happened in New Zealand during this term – it really affected me and made it hard to sit down and work for about a week in the middle there. I also had an Apple WWDC submission, a Google internship, and Kiwi Foo during this term, which took a lot of my time. Overall, it's been an extremely busy term, and I'm really happy to be sitting here at the end of it knowing I tried my absolute best with everything – I'm really proud I managed to do everything I set out to do, at what I believe is a high level.

This week at uni we analyzed images as a class and tried to decipher the style the artist has used to get their message across 'rhetorical devices.' What I found more interesting from this lecture was the idea of 'Citizen designer' and Fay put it nicely at the end of our lecture: "Some designers get paid to design, others design to do something meaningful in the world and spark an idea." For example one poster we looked at was shepherd fairey's "HOPE" poster for the Obama campaign and the backstory behind Shepherd actually approaching them, not the other way around which I thought was pretty awesome.

Throughout the class we were working on Proverbs, but I couldn't get the idea of Citizen designer out of my head – the previous night as part of my research I was watching the news and learnt about the peaceful protests going on in Auckland where there's disputes over land which is owned historically by Māori but was seized and is now owned by Fletcher's building company. I tried to do research afterwards about it, but couldn't find any good sources for learning about the history of the land, and why it was so important to Māori. I asked everyone at the start of class as a group if anyone else was watching and knows the history behind the situation and I learnt more about it – to me it seemed like such an injustice and inequality, and one that was happening *as we sat there in class*.

I wanted to do something about it, so I did a couple exercises of the proverbs but couldn't get Ihumātao out of my head. I thought of some ideas that I could pursue, and ending up liking the idea of boot prints the grassy landscape – showing the police and Fletchers making marks on sacred land without any respect – but I wanted to put a twist on it and try juxtaposition by having Maori symbols on the boot – much like one of the previous posters we saw of the tire – which would also make it so that the viewer would have to piece the two things together to make the connection.

Topic research "in the field" on instagram – looking at protesters attitudes and signage & messaging.

From here I explored combining the image with typography – I remember seeing posters by Thomas Le Bas after the Christchurch shooting earlier this year. To me, the type really evoked a personality and deeper meaning, so I wanted to explore that with my posters.

In the final poster I included some subtext I saw across my research into inequality and land ownership & colonization. I'm extremely happy with the final poster and think it speaks to both the idea of the viewer having to make their own connections with the piece, juxtaposition and solid wording (thanks to protestor signage) all together makes a great citizen designer piece of work. Really glad we covered that in our lecture today.

Today in class we worked on our after effects project and trying to get more of the scene incorporated. As it turns out, it was one of the biggest pivotal moments thus far in the course. Originally we didn’t think our idea was that ambitious, but as we worked on it in class, we soon realised we bit off more than we could chew, and the idea in our heads likely wasn’t going to come to fruition in the time span we’ve got. 

After realising that, we said to each other: what are the most important parts of our story? How can we simplify the motion graphic while retaining the important parts of our narritave? Ultimately we decided to select the big main stages in life - childhood, teenage years, adulthood and old age, and what it means to be in that stage of life. We leant into the idea of the tree being more personified, and decided the narritave with the boy and the tree – while definitely emotional – didn’t add a whole lot to the underlying message, and would’ve slowed us down quite substantially. Our animation was also looking like it was going to be quite long, in the ballpark of a minute, which we decided was too long for Instagram, and even potentially too long for a clip on the website. We also thought our current scene was too static, there was really no movement and it looked very much like student work. We wanted to shorten it, make it more refined, and spend more time on the details. 

So with those things in mind, we had some goals:

– Create a storyline that shows growing up through the 4 stages of life and what they represent at each stage

– Animation should be short, visually interesting and work as an ad online

–  Animation should work well as a poster and on the web

We ended up brainstorming and story boarding for a while after class and we elaborated on the 4 stages of life. Both of us still really liked the tree metaphor, so we stuck with that idea.

You’re young – you’re free flowing, nimble, go in any direction, loose – flowers start blossoming comes into it

You’re a teen – you rebel, branch shoots out, you take a different direction and try new things, you gain new perspectives

You’re mature – you’re more stable, people rely on you, (bird makes nest, swing?)

You old – you’re grounded now (roots), you appreciate the little things (like the beauty of nature, butterfly lands, camera pans to show the tree in context for the first time, as if the person is no longer thinking about themselves and has time to reflect) 

Our current idea is to show the tree growing in a close up, the camera follows the tree growing from a seed 

Along with the v2 design based around questions, I also started experimenting with the upload process for students to give feedback about a course and upload photos.

The design I came up with was trying to make the process for uploading as streamlined and frictionless as possible. I designed four different question options that could randomly appear once the student clicked the “let’s go” call to action on the sidebar. If they felt so inclined, they could also continue to answer more questions.

Interim presentation – for which we presented our rough storyboard that we illustrated and made into a gif. After thinking long and hard about how we can make our motion graphic more emotional we decided to include a boy who grows up alongside the tree – as he gets older he starts to care about the tree less and less and eventually the tree dies, and he becomes sad because he didn't focus on the little things in life. We're both quite happy with the way it's headed and we're quite eager to just jump in and start making it since we really have very little time.

Google's material design is the type of style we're going for with our animation, and we've collected some great examples of their work to see how they go about laying out different colours and textures to show depth in a scene.

For our third poster, I had an idea in mind that I specifically wanted to explore since our last poster challenge – after doing more research about the amount of female CEO's in New Zealand I thought a good visual metaphor would be the classic business/school 'Hello my name is' red badge. Except the majority of the names would be John. I found out this week in my research that of the top 50 companies in NZ (NZX50) there is one female CEO – Kate McKenzie, Chorus. Which genuinely blew me away. That's a 2% population of female CEOs, and as one might conclude the smaller companies may be no better. A shocking stat. But the stat I was most interested in from the beginning of my research was the line 'there's more CEO's named John than all female CEOs" which when I tell it to people they gasp – it's a crazy stat that just makes people say "Hold up what?" Article: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12040028

So I explored the name tag motif with a sense of 'overwhelm' which is what I was going for:

And finally I explored the idea of having the tags stuck to a suit, which are typically worn by men, along with a grey background to contrast the red nicely but also to make it look a bit boring in the sea of men.

I was actually really happy with it, so after I had the tags laid out how I wanted them I went over the top with my iPad's pencil to draw the signatures:

Today I took advantage of our printers at uni to print out a lot of my bookwork and thining for the past week which were saved digitally, since we don't have a printer at my flat. I also got critique on my latest spread which is of the undergound night market. People told me they loved how simple it was while conveying a strong message. In order to prepare for next week's class-wide crit I need to do the following:

• Title page
• Produce a better map page
• Add more detail to current illustrations
• Add quantitative scale to every page

After talking to brian, I realised it would be extremely hard to get lecturers to write all of that content, and he suggested I run it like wikipedia, where people can edit courses themselves and suggest changes.

So I did some research around wikipedia and found that there was a lot of friction involved with editing – as there should be to protect from griefing. It was also intimidating for a lot of people to suggest edits when they felt like they weren’t subject masters.

There’s also a big issue with course content, which is that someone's experience with a course is very subjective. If someone suggested the course description be “the course was good because it taught students how to use modelling and prototyping tools” another student could say “The course was all about understanding ergonomics of coffee machines” – they’re both right! They had different experiences with the course, and neither of them is wrong.

So I went back to the drawing board, and thought, what would this look like if there was no lecturer input at all? So I took it back to the basics. Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. I started thinking of sub-questions that students might ask other students: Who teaches this course? Why should someone care about this course? What type of previous knowledge is required for the course?

I started thinking of what that might look like on a page – questions and answers.

I was thinking of having students ask questions, and other students could up vote, and reply to comments – similar to functionality on reddit. However, I identified a few potential issues with this approach:

– Students are using this site mostly at the start and end of the year. If a question is asked at the end of the year, it might not be answered until a year later – leaving a ‘ghost-town’ feel to the website where there’s a bunch of unanswered questions.

– Without reaching critical mass, questions might not even be asked in the first place

So I thought it would be good to have questions pre-made, and ready for students who wanted to ask them, and not display a bunch of unanswered questions on each page.

In this design, students can browse

I got feedback from students that this was harder to browse though than the last design and wasn’t as easy to find information that they were looking for.

I did however learn that giving a prompt question to students would mean they were more likely to write a meaningful comment – especially if the process was gamified or randomised.

Pros:

• Lower barrier to upload content – the question is like a prompt rather than writing a random comment
  
• 
  

Cons:

• Worse information architecture and content – hard to emphasise important questions or topics without moderation
• Not easily scannable by students looking for certain information
• If no students had answered questions, the pages would be completely blank – AKA useless

This week in class we focused on identifying symbols and turning news articles into a convincing poster that highlights the most important details clearly. In the lecture we saw a couple great examples of posters that make you as the viewer 'hunt' for the meaning behind the poster, which I thought worked very well with the below poster 'Tired' – you feel as you've done something special to uncover the meaning behind the poster which gives you a sense of accomplishment and deeper connection to the poster – at least it did for me.

After our lecture we did another exercise trying to understand the meaning behind symbols and when they're used in conjunction with each other how they can take on other meanings, for example a zig zag looks like a crack when you combine it on top of an image of a castle, which can then have further meaning, of say for instance the British crown collapsing. It was a pretty interesting exercise which made me think out of the box a little more.

Afterwards we did an exercise in teams of two creating a poster about a news article and extracting the important details like headline, sub headline and a fact or stat. For our poster we took the 'curb the housing crisis' literally and showed the housing crisis right at the curb, how people are living in cars on the side of the street. It was an interesting example mostly for being able to identify catchy words and meaningful stats in an article.

This week in class we've been working on storyboards and wireframes for the website. We also sorted out the theme for our project "Tipu: Growing together" and we've locked in our idea of having a tree as the metaphor for growing up in stages/seasons of life which we both really liked from Warren's music. We've also sorted a really nice colour scheme and visual style as well as some good looking mood boards and artists models. Overall I'm really stoked with how we're working together as a team – we've been able to collaborate well and have been using Trello quite a bit to work together. We've also been using the Milanote app online to keep up to date with our workbook which has proven a great resource because we're able to work on it together at the same time.

Tracking along nicely I think!

For homework we were asked to find different examples of the latch principles of organising information based on the LATCH principle of information architecture.

Location

For location I chose the Pokemon go app, because it was one of the biggest map based digital experiences in the world, aside from like, google maps. You'd find Pokemon only in certain locations on the map, and the really cool part was that you actually had to travel to the locations to unlock the Pokemon. Talk about location based information.

Alphabetical

For alphabetical I was going to use a contacts app as I'm sure everyone else has done, but someone in class turned me on to the BBC's iPlayer app because it was so similar to our original alphabetical concept. Instead of news articles it was radio stations, and I think the UI made it feel a lot more analogue than most digital experiences typically do. I really like this example, because it makes sense that you'd scrub through your radio stations alphabetically (or in this case numerically, which counts as alphabetical IMO)

Time based

For time based, I found a weather app called CARROT that showcases a timeline UI really nicely, and in a very fun & novel way. Users can scroll through a side swiping list to see how the weather will act at certain times of the day. The app even gives a visual indication of the temperature dropping, literally by moving further down the screen.

Category

For category, I found two apps that use a very similar style that I really like – Spotify and uber eats have search pages which also include categories, so if you can't remember exactly what you were looking for but you know for example that it was a Mexican restaurant, the categories can help you on your way to finding what you were looking for.

Hiehrachy

For hierarchy I found Trade Me's sorting feature quite a good example, because you're able to sort from highest price to lowest price. Something I do quite often because I want to get rid of the spammy cheap china crap and look at the quality stuff first. It also means if im looking for something for a certain price I can scroll until I found the price bracket I want to pay and see what my money could get me. Obviously not just trade me has this feature, but it's more useful for large retailers with a bunch of products than a small list of content.

This week we had our halfway critique. It was a very interesting experience to see the methodologies, all the different strengths and weaknesses, and effort by the students in our class. I found it extremely empowering, and reinforced why I believe design education is important. It felt very cool to critique people's work, and have others critique mine.

What I learnt was that people appreciated the spreads that were the least busy. Simple and straightforward was liked the most. I'm definitely lacking the most in my map spread, and the food & drink spread where I found it difficult to be some and straightforward with so much text to deal with

Today I met with one of my lecturers/mentors at Massey, we had a great conversation about the elective site and how to get students involved. I told him about how I was considering having it become a portfolio builder too, but then thought that would cause too much friction. So I was a bit stuck with getting students to upload their work. I also told him I was considering making it an entirely student run website, and that's when the conversation got interesting. He told me, taking his academic hat off, that is probably where I'd have the most success. But I told him that I wanted Massey's help with getting teachers involved with setting up their profiles, and courses. He told me that would be pretty difficult – they've already got so much on their plate that it probably wouldn't be worth it. I was also concerned the site would turn into one of those "rate your teacher" sites which commonly are quite negative towards teachers. We ended up agreeing that I should create it student first, and then once tutors caught wind of the fact that their courses were being uploaded by students and the site picks up speed, they might be inclined to write their own content. He also agreed that I should focus on the school of design, and try to make my target audience as small as possible to begin with, as long as it's easy to expand. As I left, he said to think of it like Wikipedia, where anyone can edit the content, but it's moderated.

But, I thought, who do I know who contributes to Wikipedia? How does someone even do that? It's not super clear or inviting. So I thought: I want to decrease friction for students uploading information, but I want the information to still be useful. I also thought, what a pain it would be to find one student to write the first draft of the class overview page, which isn't an accurate representation of everyone in the classes view. If someone changed that, it would be their view of the class. Rather than Wikipedia where most things are Objective, the way a student views an elective they've done is very Subjective.

I was pretty stuck at this point. So I just started doing some wire-framing – playing around, and taking the pages back to their most basic layout. I always like going back to Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. So I laid those out on the page as titles. Then I thought of questions behind them: What is this course like? Who are the lecturers? How much work is it? You know, questions that prospective students might ask students who have done the course already. After that, an idea kind of just fell into place. What if the site just asked students these questions straight up? Then, multiple students could answer the question and you'd get different viewpoints without entirely overwriting the whole page and another student's thoughts.

So I thought of an MVP user flow. Students would arrive at the homepage which would ask them if they need help, or they want to help. If they selected that they needed help, they'd be able to search for courses and find interesting ones. Once on a course, they could see what other students have answered to those common WWWWWH questions. If a student selected to help, they'd be able to choose an elective they've done in the past, then answer a random question about it in 280 characters or less. I figure this might gameify the uploading process in a way, by having a random question it becomes exciting, and the student can opt to answer more questions if they feel like it. Once lecturers decided they wanted to add their own descriptions, they could fill out a form to put in the required info, and the student examples would be merged with the lecturers content. This means that even if lecturers haven't been bothered to upload a description, there wlll still be content. I figure this is a much better way of getting feedback from students. I'm really happy with it. Now to create a prototype and do some testing with the two different versions on Tuesday.

Today in the lecture we talked about pace of the narrative and bringing out emotional responses. One thing I liked was Jason repeatedly told us not to make a "and then" story – which I think can actually be really challenging, but a great lesson and goal to work towards, having pace in our narritave, and an emotional response from the audience as the narritave goes on is something I'd really like to focus on for this project.

In class Louie and I also worked on getting our mood board together – something that was really fun to collaborate on. We could bounce visual ideas off each other and found that we actually both have really similar taste and vision for the direction of the visual style of the project.

I started researching the giving tree after class based on the emotional narritaves. I asked my family what they thought of a story of a tree growing old as a narritave for life. They liked it and said it reminded them of the giving tree, which I've since found out isn't really a New Zealand children book – but there are apparently adaptations to the story. If you haven't read it, there's a great YouTube video online. It basically shows how the older the boy gets the less he cares about the tree – until one day when he's very old and all he wants to do is sit, the tree is a stump and he appreciates the little things.

This week I enjoyed our lecturer slides because there was discussion about images without typography that made you feel something and understand what the image is trying to say without words – the example given was a poster of a wedding ring box, but the ring was actually handcuffs underneath the box. For our exercise in class we had a similar game to Pictionary, except we had to draw 10 posters based on a word we were given – I got band-aid, explosion and pig.

After doing my sketches there were a couple images I liked, but the one that stood out to me was an image of someone putting money into a piggy bank and another arm reaching from the bottom and catching the money coming through the bottom. In my research of inequality I found that there was some discussion of how most of the banks in NZ are run by Australian companies – meaning that we're spending money on our banks in New Zealand but that money isn't being taxed in New Zealand and isn't creating as many New Zealand jobs. This sounded like some form of inequality to me, so I went for it. One interesting stat I found was that Australian banks make $580,000 per hour in New Zealand – which is multiple people's salaries. If that money was invested back into New Zealand (in an ideal world where the government works and all of the money from a bank doesn't go straight to the top) there might be less inequality.

I played with the idea of an alternate title "while you count pennies, he's counting maybachs" – emphasizing how when you're spending your money at the bank, the money just travels up the chain and makes the rich dude richer, but as I said in my previous post I want my posters to not seem so gloomy and hopeless but offer an alternative – such as switching to an NZ back. It might not stop the rich dude getting richer – maybe nothing will – but it'll give back to our economy and provide NZ with more jobs. That sounds like a win to me, so that's what I decided on.

My process:

Final poster:

First week done! It's been a great success and I'm really enjoying working on the project alongside Louie. We're both on the same page it seems like and tracking along well. We've done a bunch of mood boards, found motion graphics inspiration, a bunch of artist models and the history of Bats theatre, as well as been analysing the lyrics of Warren's music quite in depth.

I've also personally been enjoying lecturers and time in class to talk to other students about motion graphics – it's been an area of interest for me for the past couple years and I've been really excited to properly give it a shot.

Over the weekend and during next week louie and I are going to keep researching and brainstorming ideas for our project as well as looking into artist models and other visual styles we both really like.

This week I was exploring in more detail isometric illustrations. I personally love doing vector illustrations but have become rusty, and would like to try a style of illustration I haven't tried before. Isometric was brought up to me because of this interesting article by the Uber design team, who recently redesigned all of their car icons in 3D

https://medium.com/uber-design/upgrading-ubers-3d-fleet-4662c3e1081

It got me thinking about how food trucks would look as an isometric view.

I also visited the farmers market this week and was thinking a lot about how it might look from a different perspective, like from above, or from side on without any perspective. This made me think back to apple's WWDC 2016 branding which included a top down view of a chaotic sea of people, similar to how you might see at a farmers market.

I also noticed how colourful the market is, not just in fruits and vegetables, but in the green, red, orange and yellow bins that are organised every week to create a systematic flow to the farmers market. One image that caught my eye was when they don't stack perfectly, it reminded me of the yotam otteligign book cover "plenty more" and the overlapping translucent colours are something I'm interested in exploring.

I started my design by thinking about the questions students might want answers for when looking for electives. I asked a bunch of friends and students from my class for feedback, and resolved with the top 5 questions, including a bio. They were:

• What you’ll learn
• Who you’ll learn from
• What others think
• Who this course is for
• What you’ll be doing
  

Lecturers would answer most of these questions, and students would upload for the “what do others think”

This mimicked review sites like yelp where there was official information provided by the resturaunt, like a menu, opening hours, about sections etc – but with a review section so students could see what other students work looked like, or see comments they wrote about the course.

This meant that the small action students could do was upload a photo of their work, or leave a comment on the course, giving them two options.

Pros:

• Shows important information for students
• Easy to read and follow
  

Cons:

• Relies entirely on lecturer/student content to make a page (ie pages dont exist until someone writes some content)

‍

Since our first lesson I've been researching inequality in New Zealand and what comes to mind for friends and family when they think of inequality in New Zealand. I conducted my own research too, In my research I was drawn to facts and figures because they're what really makes a story of inequality meaningful to me in the shortest way possible – say for a poster. For my original poster I found the quote that there's more men named John than all female CEOs. One of the other inequalities I've been investigating is the imbalance of Maori population in New Zealand prisons. For example, Maori make up more than 50% of prison populations but only account for less than 18% of NZ's entire population. Another interesting stat around wealth distribution: The richest two men in New Zealand have more combined wealth than the bottom 30% of NZ – roughly 1.2 million people. Obviously though I'd like to drill down further than just financial inequality. Another lesser known inequality I found was how the IRD spends much more money prosecuting benefit fraud vs tax evasion – even when the latter is far more prominent and loses much more money. Source: Benefit fraud v tax avoidance - why is one dealt with more harshly by courts?

In class today we looked at inequality as a whole group and brainstormed what we know of inequality in NZ – my group was given race and housing.

‍

I also asked my Twitter followers what came to mind when they think of inequality in NZ and I got some great responses – the link is available here: https://twitter.com/emoryzanef/status/1151724445842587648

I especially loved this comic strip I was linked which highlighted low level inequality and how it can effect someones entire life of just the small things: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate – made me grateful for the family I was born into and it's such a shame that the world is such a lottery – that's why I think it's so good we're studying inequality. However I'm very interested in creating a poster not just highlighting inequality but offering a possible solution – even if that was highlighting an organization fighting inequality in New Zealand, for example girlboss.

Today in class we explored doing paper prototypes and talked about the LATCH methodology for sorting information. We started by looking at doing paper sorting of articles base on what category we felt they'd come under, and then sorting the articles into their respective categories. From there we explored the concept of LATCH organization for displaying data. LATCH is the idea that data can be sorted & displayed 5 different key ways – Location, Alphabetically, Time, Category, and Hierarchy. Since as a class we all explored the idea behind categorical organization, we each had to come up with an interface to display news articles based on the other ones. My group got alphabetical sorting, which I initially dismissed as easy & boring to do, since it would just be an alphabetical list. But Awa said to us let's think of it a different way, what if each letter of the alphabet was arranged in a circle, and you could scrub through each letter like an original iPod click wheel? I thought that was a pretty awesome idea, but there needed to also be a visual indication of the article up the top, rather than just when you let go – so that you can truly scrub through the articles.

Afterwards, we had some time in class to start doing some paper prototypes of potential ideas for our website, and after talking to friends and family about an idea I had, I decided to try out the interface for it. My idea is based around the idea of being able to see news location based. Sometimes I really just want to see Wellington news, and sometimes I want to see world news – heck I even want to see news based on my suburb if that was possible. So I had the idea of being able to zoom in and out on your current location to filter news stories based on where they are. So for example if I was zoomed into Kelburn, I would get posts (like tweets) of people in Kelburn, and when I zoomed all the way out I could see world news. After telling my parents about the concept they really liked it because they're considering moving to the Hawke's Bay in a couple years and told me they have a really hard time getting aggregated news from the Hawke's Bay. Below are the concepts I came up with for the UI.

The first screen would show you the top 5 stories im your location – and these top 5 stories would be the same for everyone across the location, not based on an algorithm because I feel like that just allows people to live in their news bubbles, and I resonated with the idea behind newspapers being something where everyone sees a single incident on the front page and can talk about what happened – everyone knows about it. From there you can click on a story, but rather than showing you an article, it shows you an aggregation of all of the articles written about an incident, so you can read different information based on the news outlet to get the whole story. This page would also include any important tweets or videos because I really enjoy being able to hear what people are saying about a specific story. That's why I mostly use twitter or reddit for my news, because I really enjoy seeing what people are saying, and the back and forth between someone who has an opposing view.

I also had the idea of doing a 'read, watch, or listen' approach to the app, where you could click a tab at the bottom and quickly jump to the top videos of the day, or top radio stations/snippets. It would be great if there was some way to have consistency between the tabs, so that the top 5 stories are always the same, but just the media changes. A good use case of this would be my mom who current uses an app called haystack news. While she cooks she sometimes plays the app in the background, which basically plays the top news videos of the day, from all different sources. If she doesn't want to keep listening to a video she can swipe to go to the next one. I really like this and definitely want to incorporate this into my website because a lot of people digest the news while they're doing something else, and not everyone has time to be reading articles.

‍

The other idea I had was similar, but based around the idea of instagram stories UI, where you could read a story in chunks. One page could be one paragraph of an article, and you can tap back and forth to flick between paragraphs, and swipe to skip the story. I talked to my girlfriend's friend who current gets her news this way by following an account called 'shityoushouldcareabout' on instagram – which is basically a news outlet covering stuff teenagers should know. I think this is a great way of getting people engaged with the news, but it would be great if you could also read comments about what others think, rather than just the instagram page.

This was a long post. I know, my bad. I just wanted to get everything in my brain out.

Today in class we chatted about news and how to make it more accessible

Learning's & notes from class today:

Was really interesting to hear from Warren Maxwell today about his philosophy and what his music means – to summarize my notes, he's a deep thinker, thinks a lot about the state of the world, how our children won't experience the same things we're experiencing, not getting worked up about the little things and making them into bigger deals than they are, for men it's good to be peaceful – you don't have to be macho all the time, and his idea that resonated the most with me was:

Life happens in seasons & stages, we're born, we become the salmon fighting the river in our teenage years, and become a butterfly going with the breeze in our adult years. It reminded me of some of the lyrics of my favorite song by Tame Impala:

"Just growin' up in stages,
Livin' life in phases,
Another season changes"

I really resonate with that message, I look back sometimes at the places I was in 1 or 2 years ago and think how much life has changed. Especially being at Massey, changing up the courses every 6 weeks really makes a year feel like very seasonal. It definitely had me thinking of creative concepts and ways to illustrate those ideas of seasonality and growing up in stages. He talked also a lot about the environment and protecting the Whenua, similar to Kaitiakitanga, which I also resonate with a lot.

Words I took note of were: Reincarnation, Metamorphosis, Oranga, Kaitiakitanga

‍

This week we were tasked with creating some collages. Normally I hate collage, but I found this alright. I started using photoshop and looking for images online, but I was bombarded by stock images with watermarks and got really frustrated with Photoshop. I decided to go to a magazine store (minerva on cuba) and pick up some magazines – the wonderful woman gave me some old ones for free, and I purchased one called 'good' – I ended up enjoying collage in real life and getting absorbed in the craft, and was very nice to be off the computer for a change.

Start of a new project! Fun. This one's all about inequality in New Zealand, and we're making posters around one of the social issues of our choosing. Today in class we played Pictionary which was super fun, and looked at everyone's drawings, and then the lecturers switched it up on us and told us we were to make our first inequality poster with one of the drawings.

We also had two mini lecturers from guests about equality for women and racism towards pacific people – Notes below for more research & pull quotes:

• When someone gets mugged do we ask what they were wearing?
  
• Mental illness - Men asking for help for mental illness
  
• Immigration - Dawn raids - Dawn raids exhibition 
  
• Peter theil bought immigration to NZ but Dawn raids were a thing 
  
• "It happened here" - hate crime reports 
• Emory Douglas

I ended up doing a couple poster explorations, and tried to pick imagery that I thought others might not do to have some variety. One that stood out to me was an image of a crowd, which instantly made me think of a quote I had heard in preliminary research for this project: There's 4x as many CEOs in NZ named John than there are women.

I also explored a couple different sketches which can be seen below. I loved the very simple nature of these posters and the exercise in general was top notch, I usually hate poster making and collage/photoshop but loved this exercise because it forced me to have an idea and imagery already set, which is oddly what I like.

Ferry experience

No way to buy tickets online. 

Walked past the ferry and tried to find out where to buy tickets. Assumed you buy tickets on the boat, happened to spot the ferry building from far away. Sign says please buy tickets from the building.

Went in to buy a ten trip and asked if all 4 of us could use it. The man said only two of us can use it at a time, so Clare and I had to buy our own one

Had to wait 45 minutes for next ferry. Worried about losing the ten trip.

Observations while waiting: 

The sign says Metlink, but their website isn’t on metlink and I can’t use snapper. Why is that?

Can I take my bike/scooter on the ferry if I’m a commuter?

Why can’t they use snapper?!

Do they have a toilet on board?

No student discount for a standard ticket. Only for the ten trip.

This sign is a total wtf. For someone who doesn’t know what Eastbourne/seatoun/days bay is this is utterly confusing. Also why does the PM wrap to another line? Visual communications wise it a so bad.

Also I know from personal experience that sometimes there’s an express ferry, but it is so hard to tell from the sign which times are the express ferry

Prices are around the back. I wouldn’t have even known that.

What is the other side like?

If someone just bought a one way ticket then how do they get back? Is there a way to get tickets to the other side?

Do you get a refund if the weather is bad?

The website says that for real time updates about cancellations you have to go to metlink website. Why is that?

We were late!! A girl just came outside and asked “are you guys waiting for the ferry? Yup. It’s about to leave you better run!” 

<Had a video of us running to the ferry but it's a bit embarrassing frankly>

To be fair, probs our fault. Nice that we got reminded. 

Voiceover starts playing very quietly about safety. Could hardly hear what they said.

Very annoying vibrating on the seats. Started speeding up and the vibrations went away. 

Monthly craft beer is pretty cool. Nice they sell drinks.

Asked the skipper guy about if we didn’t have tickets what we would do? He said you can buy them on the ferry. 

Also asked about why we couldn’t put more than 2 people on a ten trip. “Because it would mean we would get more groups of people” “it’s meant for commuters” – basically they want people to pay the proper price. 

Hard to get a pram or bike through since there’s lip on the door/raised doorway.

If there was heaps of people in here there’s hardly anywhere to hold on to when standing.

Guy in the back using his laptop on his lap. Would be nice if there were food up tray tables like in lecture theatres. 

Asked the ferry guy, he said dogs are allowed on board. Nice one.

On tourist loaded trips it would be cool if you could get a voice tour where someone talks for one minute and then doesn’t talk for another ten. Or only on the top deck or something 

We stopped off at seatoun before continuing.

The girls were gonna get off in seatoun but since the way people came on they couldn’t walk up the path, by the time they got up to the top they hard already removed the walkway thing. There was never any message to get off in seatoun or never any chance from the crew to get off. The girls ultimately missed their point to get off in seatoun and had to take the whole ride back to town

Interestingly there’s no indication of where we’re going. I didn’t even know we were going to seatoun and as we leave seatoun I’m not sure if we’re going to somes island. Trains usually say next stop, but you have no indication with the ferry

No indication of restaurants on somes island (Awa mentioned there is sometimes someone that says on the radio “there’s no food on the island so this is your last chance to get something”)

I didn’t know Eastbourne shops and days bay were a different thing.  Neither did the tourists.

Talked to some tourists about how they found the ferry. They were just walking past and decided to take it. They had no idea where it was going to take them but decided to just do it. They told me they wished there was someone explaining the history of Wellington harbour or where they were going next, but otherwise was a nice experience.

The girls asked the guy hey we wanted to get off in seatoun, he said can I ask why you wanted to get off in seatoun? The girls said because we live in Kilbirnie, and he said oh we assumed you were doing a round trip. The next ride back to seatoun is in an hour. She said oh that’s a shame, I guess we’ll just go back into town then. He said yeah sorry about that I can give you your ride back to town for free.

General theme: a lot of assumptions.

When leaving Eastbourne a couple tried to get on at 4:25. The ferry was set to leave at 4:30 but they put the walkway up as soon as people finished walking, so they were really confused how to get on and if they missed the boat or not. They looked plain sad and confused. The ferry guy heard me asking if they were waiting for the ferry and came up and put the bridge back on. Not sure if he would have noticed otherwise.

No wifi on board for commuters.

My takeaways on what they could pretty easily improve:

– Just waiting longer and making sure people who wanted to get on were on and people who wanted to get off could.

– A guided tour of the history of the area, or at least someone explaining where the next destination was going to be.

– Tray tables & wifi for commuters to use their laptops.

This week in class we were exploring the differences between good and bad websites, exploring our ideas further and creating wireframes on paper. Thankfully, one of our chosen websites to research was the Massey electives flow for finding new information, since that's what my topic is about. In my user testing with a classmate it took her 20 minutes to find the yellow booklet containing the information, because it's not on the main Massey site, only on Coca, and even when you're on Coca's site its hard to find since it's a PDF.

I asked students in class what they thought of the yellow book and overall there were two main problems with it:

It doesn't provide enough useful information – it's literally just a brief description

And it isn't sortable/filterable – meaning students have to look through multiple pages of random electives when they might only be interested in VCD ones.

‍

With that information I started with the hardest problem first – what other information is necessary for students to see. What other info are they looking for? In doing that, I asked two seperate groups of 4 students for 10 minutes of their time to do a card sorting exercise with me, in which we brainstormed different pieces of information they'd like to see on the site, and then ordered them based on priority.

This proved to be an extremely valuable experience as I was learning directly from my target audience what they were looking for – perfect. They ranked the top 5 as: Name, Description, Copy of brief, Student work photos, and lecturer information.

A great stepping point into wire framing when we're back from the holidays – I'll probably jump straight into Figma as I work faster there than with a pen and paper.