Glenda from employability gave a talk today about the importance of resilience, especially at this time in the academic year, pressures of finding a placement opportunity and the increased tempo coming into second year all contribute to this importance of resilience.
We discussed the meaning of resilience, to me, resilience is being able to get back up when you fall. Being determined on what matters to you and showing up for yourself. I think resilience has played a big role in my development as a designer so far as I entered this world with no real graphic or illustrative experience but I have managed to hold my own and shine in my own light thanks to my resilience. Glenda spent some time talking about the importance of self confidence and how we portray ourselves to others. Whilst it’s easy to let your work speak on your behalf it’s not the full picture, often time employers are looking for the right person for the job, not in just their skillset but in their demeanour and how they carry themselves. I try my best to be confident and to engage with others when possible but it’s definitely an area where I could stand to improve, especially with placement opportunities coming up.
It was a good talk and one that needed to be had. Unfortunately not everyone will get a placement role and I think thats what today was all about. I would find it very discouraging if i’m not able to land a placement role but I understand that the industry is in a strange place at the moment, that being said I still have confidence in my abilities as a designer and in myself as a person to make it happen.
I attended a talk recently, lead by the folks over at **Big Motive,** all about accessible design. What I took from this talk is that a majority of accessibility issues aren’t due to colour contrasts being too weak and the likes but due to issues with the content. Whether it’s the language being used or how the content has been structured it all seems to stem from the actual content. This affirms what we covered in class today. You can deny someone the chance to even use a product due to poor content accessibility never mind having issues whilst using it. I think accessibility will only continue to become more popular as design becomes more and more focused on the user rather than the product itself. I seen a crazy statistic recently, I think around 93% of the web is inaccessible to all. Meaning that companies are potentially eliminating a massive group of potential users for their product. This changed my perspective of accessibility greatly, allowing me to view it not as a crutch to the design but as a tool to reach a greater audience and allow for more users and traffic.
As always with accessibility we looked at .gov’s products as they are a great example of accessibility done right. Government bodies and other public sector ran organisations seem to always be the ones to get accessibility right, that being said some such as NI Direct have a long way to go. A great example of it done right that I found is Helsinki’s website. You can view this below.
We talked about content some more, specifically, content curation. I have always enjoyed the idea of curation as like everyone I think I have good taste. All jokes aside it is an area of design that has definitely piqued my interest before. It seems to cover all areas of life, whether it be in museums, digital spaces, furniture or even clothes. There is a huge demand for curation and it seems as a kind of bi-product of becoming a designer we also become curators. As a designer we will be curating a business’ appearance, tone of voice, language and even engagement. It to me is a reminder of how demanding a role design can be, I feel you really must be multifaceted to thrive in this industry, and that might be why it attracts such quality talent from all areas of life.
A good way to demonstrate my own content curation abilities will be through my portfolio. It will be a chance for me to curate my own work and language to best convey myself as an individual and a designer. This will be done mostly through text I imagine so I’ll need some solid case studies to do so.
We discussed user stories and how they help in the developmental process of a product. User stories sound like the perfect way to cement what it is your product actually does. I have always felt that my research can be a little lacklustre at times and it is elements such as user stories that seem to bring it together really well. Simply put, user stories are a way of defining what you want somebody to do on your product. Kyle outlined a super simple way of laying this out.
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“As a ____, I want to _____, So I can _____”
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We can’t use user stories effectively without an acceptance criteria. These are the conditions that a product must meet in order to be accepted by the user and attain functionality. They can be viewed as the lowest level of functionality. If the user story is; “As a runner, I want to track my runs, so I can record my progress” then the acceptance criteria must be that the product allows fro a way to record runs. I managed to find an interesting article about user stories and acceptance criteria that helped me further understand the concepts. It even touches on design sprints which seem interesting.
Acceptance Criteria for User Stories and their role in product development