UX Design Immersive @ GA SF Allison Cooper

I get a lot of requests for more information from people who find this blog and are considering taking the General Assembly UX Design Immersive course in San Francisco — and I’ve loved meeting so many cool new UX Designers this way!

Please feel free to email me at allison [at] allisonmariecooper [dot] com and set up a time to chat on the phone — I find that’s easiest — and I can try to answer any questions you have and speak to my own experience with General Assembly and in the entry-into-UX-Design-world of the Bay Area if you promise to say hi if we ever run into each other at a design event in the future :) 

Wow, I really blew it in terms of keeping up my constant blogging during the last three weeks of class —which were super intense and whizzed by, to be fair. We started off post-break with a full day of presentations about the personal projects people worked on over break; unfortunately, I'd spent the last couple days of our holiday break and much of early that week in a flu-y feverish daze and didn't get to finish the work I started. More posted on that later! I was thrilled to be working with incredible designer/classmate Stephanie on our final project, and that our client was Spark, a locally-based network of young philanthropists (the largest in the world!) for women's issues. They have a really innovative model for involvement (in that members can be as involved as they want, and there are many opportunities for 'tapping in and tapping out') and for philanthropy through their Investment Committee discussions for how to best invest members' donations. We soon found all the lectures from class about working with clients to be true as our prototypes proved to be the best communication tool possible, leading us naturally into all the necessary conversations to avoid scope creep, lack of direction/common ground or any other misunderstandings with our wonderful clients. After sketching lots of user journeys and conducting comparative and background research, we were honoured to have the opportunity early in the next week to present at their Digital Strategy Committee about our work so far and the pros and cons of our proposed concepts.

Another challenge of this project was our constraints from our clients of working in wordpress; while we'd become quite comfortable throughout the course of the class of prototyping imagined concepts with limitless budgets for custom development, we were now operating in a real world of budget and time constraints which here limited the technological tools at our disposal. The new design needed to be a wordpress template because it was a content management system that the staff were comfortable with as well as cost-effective in terms of implementation costs. We pored through wordpress theme sites and "best-of" listings to find themes that fit the visual design standards of our clients and our information architecture needs and that would require the least possible extra hacking possible to accommodate new and returning users. Luckily, a friend of our wonderful designer-in-residence Bojana, Rob of babalucas.com designs, took the time to give Stephanie and I an incredible afternoon of wordpress customization/use 101 tutoring and answered our limitless questions to the point that I felt comfortable spending the weekend installing wordpress and hacking at various themes. Thanks so much again, Rob!!

Also in the first week back in class in 2014 we got to visit HUGE's San Francisco office, where it was incredibly valuable learning how their design teams work, helping me better understand and shape a model for where I want to fit in—more and more I'm finding myself most excited by the early wireframing and prototyping process, where the fun meaty brainstorming and messy visualizing of possibilities happens. This visit, complemented with the continued lunchtime 'job search standup' seminars through GA, got me even more excited about the potential design careers that exist in San Francisco (and beyond).

Finally, possibly my favourite workshop of the whole course was our energetic afternoon of rapid prototyping around mental models with the endlessly inspiring Indi Young. I was excited to work with some classmate-friends I hadn't had the chance to build with before in our impromptu rapid prototyping session and we had a lot of fun drawing ideas for wearables on ourselves and taping iPads to arms with screens quickly made in the Paper by fiftythree iPad app for a demo that I teared-up laughing through. Watch for our comprehensive smartwatch for runners in stores soon ;)

For our final project in the UX Design Immersive course, we were tasked with reexamining the new user and onboarding experiences for the largest network of millenial philanthropists, Spark (sparksf.org).

Check out our final presentation above, and the prototype here!

Last week's "get-at-the-essence-of-the-product/need" exercise involved playing with clay and making out-of-this-world gadgets—too much fun, but also incredibly revealing and an important reminder to stay in touch with your user(s) and core functionalities...... and of course to ask my favourite designer question: "How would it work if it was magic?"

My quick idea (from the prompt to create an interface out of the small iPod-nano-sized pieces of index cards provided, and to build around the interface however suits the product best out of clay) for my team's project 3 (to build an events discovery and ticket purchase app/system) was a watch that connected to a user's schedule, budget, location data and social sphere to find events based on your interests that fit in their schedule, buy tickets for them, give them directions to the event, serve as a digital ticket upon arrival at the event, and even turn into a nametag at networking/social events (that, in the style of the #FS13 FutureStack conference in October) exchanged contact information when touched to another user's watch/nametag.

Project #3 ideation: Love our team and thinking with post-its! These are from our persona creation from user research all the way to our very first paper prototypes. Our assignment was to design an events discovery and mobile ticket purchasing app for Fandango.

Last weekend I was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Women Who Code- and Twitter-organized Chime for Change #ChimeHack hackathon (at the Twitter and One Kings Lane offices in San Francisco)-- the first hackathon I've ever registered for as a designer! Although I wasn't able to make it to the first night, I am so grateful I got to join a wonderful team and work on some big systems/user flows and UI design-- and of course learn so much about coding, teamwork, time management, visual design, presentations (presented in front of a terrifyingly all-star cast of judges..!), last-minute Adobe creative suite hacking, and everything in between from my incredible team and mentors. I was so excited to work on the project pitched by UNICEF to update/digitize their Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF program. We didn't win, but I sure am proud of the work we did-- and hope it all ends up helping out the nonprofits involved! Huge congrats to all the amazing winning teams, and massive thank you to all the organizers (especially the wonderful Alaina et al from Women Who Code) for putting on an awesomely inspiring weekend!

Check out our submission and all the other incredible project submissions from the weekend here!

I had so much fun drawing my first-ever researched user flow/scenario, and our team's high-level concept ideas for our third class project (about an event discovery app)!

(Sorry for the blurriness of the second image!)