StudentInBerlin

1.   https://www.waze.com/nl/ The reason why Waze in on my wall of fame is the concept of giving users the directions. The application is easy and fun in use, there are features that I can play free by an X amount of kilometres and it's almost a social platform. The interaction with the application is fun to do and the most important part it's real-time. Every user can add problems on the road and give feedback on others. If there is a traffic jam the application gives me the opportunity to go in a different and faster direction.

2.  https://toggl.com Toggl is on my wall of fame for the animations an small interactions that are possible on the website. It's an awesome website to look and the user experience is awesome!

3. https://www.routetour.nl/dashboard This website/service helps me to discover new roads and cycle other routes than I do normally. By connecting it to my Strava account they find routes that are in line with my last 10 rites I have done. This results in a happy experience because the new routes are not too hard for me and let me discover new streets to ride instead of staying on the old routes.

4. https://mysports.tomtom.com/app/latest/ I like the tomtom sports application because it helps me to be more fit and be more active. It's counting my heart rate and the steps I take in a day. Its connected to my tomtom watch and it's really easy to use. They compare last month with the current month and help you to do more every month.

1. Manus Plus

I use this application the give my availability for work, and tell them when I can work. The hard part is that I have to this for every week because I have a different availability every week. The application works really confusing for this because it's not telling me in with week I am looking and telling work my availabilty, this results in frustration and costs me lots of more time than sending a PDF file with my availability.

2. https://zon.sunweb.nl/ When I select a date range to go on a holiday, the website is still showing me holidays in other months with prices that are totally incorrect with the right month. This is frustrating and irritating. after a few times, it results in a bad user experience.

3. https://moodle.cmd.hva.nl Moodle works well most of the times, but what is frustrating is that I have to log in again every time I visit the site again.

4. https://support.apple.com/contact The real struggle of the apple experience is making an appointment with the apple genius bar. You have to do this in an online agenda and there are a few spots per week. I can select a store in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Den Haag, Haarlem). But when I look at this, most of the time there is no spot. Now comes in the frustrating part, why is Apple giving me the opportunity to go to an apple store in Londen? This is frustrating plus I only can plan a visit two weeks in the future

I just started reading the first 30 pages of the boos "je hebt wel iets te verbergen" written by the journalists of the correspondent. I started blank reading this book but, it is scary to read things about cookies places by some companies.

If I order something online, there will be a real-time biddings form a lot of "dark" companies who are selling information about me. This is information about the device that I used and the system that works on. But it is also the place where I am at that moment ore different adds they already showed me. It is a bit wired to read about those things. If you want to go deep into the process of your laptop/pc you will find a lot of data that can be analysed. But if you look at your mobile phone, what people use more and more in the last years. It felt like a "black box", to quote the French philosopher Bruno Latour. It's almost impossible to go deep into your mobile phone and see the data go their way. You have to hack your phone if you want to do that.

01. Sketchnotes like a pro! I want to learn more about making sketchnotes, I'm going to do this by some tutorials from Pinterest and create sketchnotes of the workgroups. I want to do this because it is a great way to take notes! I think as a CMD student it’s important to make notes in a creative way. Sketchnotes is a way to do this. I will upload pictures of the sketchnotes tutorials and of the sketchnotes of the workgroups. I hope my skills for sketchnotes will go up and I can improve this skill. 02. Making sketch my program I want to do more with Sketch, I use it for a while but, I think I have to learn to work in a way that us more efficiently and I want to dive more into the plugins of Sketch. I think Sketch is still the best program for making prototypes and screens.

I want to read more about the most common plugins of Sketch, use them and learn more about the program of Sketch by tutorials. If we need to design something during this minor, I want to use Sketch for that.

03. Know more about online privacy For the master test, we need to create a product that works with a lot of information about our users. I want to learn more about the online privacy and the things that are involved with that.

The day we left the hostel and went back to Amsterdam. The trip felt longer than te trip to Berlin but with a few card games we have some time to kill, when we were back at Amsterdam I went home and I’m still looking back at a great trip to Berlin.

This was our day off, so we can explore of the city and visit some places we like to see. First of all, we went to the checkpoint Charley, it was a wired place to be because now its a really touristic place beside the history this place had. After this, we went to the Topographie des Terrors this exposition was really interesting for me because it tells a lot about the war crimes of the SS and the Nazis. The other students were a bit scared of this because it had some really scary photo’s in it. It was very interesting to be here and after this we went to the Bauhaus museum, after a 35-minute walk we arrived there and the exposition of the Bauhaus was closed, really disappointed we visited the photo exposition that was there for now.

After this, we walked through the Biergarten to the Reigstad, the Jewish monumental for the holocaust and the Berliner Tor. We walked a lot this day and Berlin made a rough and grey impression on me. The people are really straightforward and don’t want to talk for a long time but this city is a historical place.

First breakfast and waking up from everything. Today we are going to visit the companies in Berlin and I'm really excited about this. In the preparation for Berlin, I was looking forward to Aperto (the first company).

Aperto is a big agency that is working in the IBM group (where they are really proud of). The vision they have is really strong. They strive to be the best company in Berlin. The way they approach a project is really different, one starts whit sketching and other are making a lot of excel sheets and dive into that. It was a really cool visit and the company was really big (it felt like a little maze in there).

Between the too company’s we had lunch and walked across the Berliner Dom, what is a really big building and the walk was pretty nice to do.

The second company was Icon Incar and to be honest it was a long presentation and they talked only about one project. A lot of things we asked for where secret and they couldn’t tell about. This was a little disappointment but after all, they make really cool projects for really big companies. they working really close to the client so they can be as helpful as needed. It was great to visit the companies and it’s a good way to learn more about the work field where we all study for

After visiting the companies we leave to the Alexanderplatz, had a look there and went to the hostel, after that we had some food and drink some beer with all the other students, after a few drinks we leave to a bar for a few new drinks.

Day one started at Amsterdam Central station. The train leaves at 09:00 and it was a close call for the train that morning. After a few hours, we were settled down and talked to each other a lot. We just had a trip of seven hours in front of us, I will skip the rest of the trip to Berlin. After we have arrived we settled down and had a little meeting for the things we could do in Berlin and for the second day. After this, I had a little room chance and after that is was time to grab some food. They have really delicious burgers in Berlin, I have to admit that! After the food, we went to a bar close to the hostel and the fun part was, everyone was there that evening. It was really cool to meet al the other students and have a lot of talk with everyone, I think we are a great group with a lot of different people going for the same goal. Creating the best User Experience they ever made in their entire life.

How do you prepare for a trip that you didn’t even like in the first place? Well, to be honest, I was a little bit afraid to go to Berlin. It was new, it was different and I don’t know a lot of people, but I think that is actually the number one reason why we go to Berlin. The last time I was in Berlin wasn’t the best time of my life, so I was a bit nervous to go there and see the city again!

The planning was really cool, we have to visit two companies on Friday. The first company is Aperto and the second one is Icon Incar. I don’t know anything about these companies but I have searched the internet for a while.

I think Aperto in an interesting company because they have a great vision in the world of design. They primes there clients a new and better digital design for everything and promises that they are the company you should need. They have a few big clients and from the outside, the building is looking really cool!

The Icon Incar website looks really messy, there is no project ore work online and I can’t even find what kind of clients they have. they work in the automotive user experience what sounds really cool. I'm excited to go there and see hopefully a few projects of them.

On Saturday we have a day so we can see the city to check out a few hotspots in the big city of Berlin. There are a few things I really wanna see. The first one is the Topographie des Terrors with is an exposition about the war crimes and the propaganda time of the Nazis and the SS. I think it’s really important and excited to learn more about this time of Germany, it’s a piece of history that tells a lot about the world we live in.

The second thing I want to do is visit the Bauhaus museum. Bauhaus had a lot of influence on modern art and design. It's really cool to visit this place after hearing a lot of stories about the Bauhaus school and museum.

After these things, I want to visit the more common things like checkpoint Charley, the Berliner tor etc.