Final Jury: Design for UX

Hi! This week we had the final jury for our industrial design course. This semester we had so much fun while designin and thinking and creating i am kind of sad we have come to an end but i am very happy with how all of our work turned out 🙂

If you haven’t got a chance to check here is our presentation for the jury:

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And here is our userflow which you can also view from here.

Let me tell you about our design to start with, we designed an application that would help the street animals in the covid-19 times, since people cannot go out as much they can’t continue their voluntary activities. So our app’s aim was to bring together the stakeholders that do voluntary work with the stakeholders who need help while supporting street animals.

since we can’t continue our classes face-to-face we did the jury online. Here is a nice memory to remember 🙂

Our jury was very kind and they told us that the app looked like it is ready to go. They had some criticization about the ranking system which we designed to motivate the users and also decide their level. Our main aim in including that in the design was to create a leveling system between users. We couldn’t give an option to create donation campaigns and collect money from other users to everyone that had an account. For security reasons we thought it would be better to give that option to the users that gained the trust of other users by showcasing their previous works. The system was also recommended by the majority of our participants that we had a feedback session with. It is also a fun way to keep the app active (what made me love that system even more is that Duolingo has it and i am using that app to get better at Italian and what makes me open the app everyday is the excitement of getting to find out which place have i fallen to, can i make it to the top?..)

The critique was understandable of course, some volunteers wouldn’t want their voluntary work to be seen as a competition, so that being an optional function could make sense. What made me surprised is the fact that our instructors also agreed with the jury and had some very funny moments 🙂 i would’ve think they would’ve commented about the ranking system that we had since the beginning of the research phase, before the jury. To overcome the security issue we could’ve think about something better and that’s on us, but we really didn’t know how other apps do it and after hours of research on the internet and also with participants, this leveling system seemed like the best option.

And we had some time problems.. The requirement was to finish the presentation in 15 minutes. And as you can imagine how hard it would be to shorten down the whole semester worth of time put into work to only 15 minutes, some of the parts that explained our development stage, were suppose to be presented in 1 minute. So we had to took out a lot of information and combine pages and diagrams and all that 😀 and finally we shortened it down to approximately 15 minutes. While listening to the other group we realized that their presentation was taking 30 minutes. So while we were relieved that we didn’t have to rush through some stuff, thinking that they would show the same understanding to us. And even though the other group didn’t get a warning to be faster we were told we were running out of time since, understandably, some jury members had to leave after the decided time for jury to be over. Since our presentation was approximately at required length we thankfully didn’t miss anything 🙂

We also had comments about the research part could’ve been more detailed which i agree. The jury told us that we should get the opinions of voluntery working people on this topic, which we did, but we didn’t mention about the participant’s voluntery work they do other than their job. So i get why this was a problem.

Also another critique was that it wasn’t as clear how covid-19’s effect was seen through the app. While we started the design with covid in mind, it kind of moved ahead of it and became an app that could be used every-other-day. So that comment is helpful for us to realise that we should focus more on people that cannot go out, as recommended by jury.

We actually had a lot of fun in the jury and after we had some good news. The overall jury was really great. The members were fun, they listened carefully and made very helpful comments. It was also nice hearing about the other group’s critics because through the semester we couldn’t really exchange ideas with them since we were divided to 2. To be honest i didn’t even know they were also working on an application. Since we were working on different (which turned out to be really similar) things we didn’t get to hear from each other as much. I really didn’t enjoy being this much seperated from the other group because we could really share ideas and all. Since half of this semester was online maybe that would be the reason cause i found myself missing the days we would all sit together on a table and work all together 🙂

Overall i am happy that i took this class and get to learn and experience and work on this design process. It was a very interesting course which thought me a lot of things. We went through a lot of stuff with our group members and overcome so many difficulties while staying up all night doing zoom meetings. But i am happy that our group was an international group that had all the meetings in english. With the language differences it was hard to share ideas at times but it made us even better as we tried harder. I really loved communicating in english and i loved the challenge it brings. Our group spirit was so good and we tried so hard to not let the language barrier come between us and in the end i wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

We had a guest jury, the director of İstasyonTEDÜ and we were informed that they were impressed with our project and are offering support to futher develop our project at the incubation center! It is the best news for us and i am really proud that we have a chance to further develop this application that we were so passionate about from the start. Wish us luckk 🙂 I will keep you updated on the process. Can you believe this is the first step of becoming an entrepreneur!!

I know this became a longg post, i get too excited at the end of the semester 😀 thank you for reading.