#cloudyapple

Week 5

Weekly highlights and progress:

Client update meeting with Zi Jia House

Call for clients on social media and word of mouth

Began dev for Zi Jia House

We have approached our first client - Zi Jia House, a vegan buffet. Our first professional interaction with them was, unexpectedly, rather emotional and human and I feel that it has set a standard upon which I'll be unconsciously comparing my future interactions with clients.

The reason it was special was the owner's openness about business history and operations, it allowed us to empathise with them, a skill rather important for a UX designer. I, however, admit that it's usually a more difficult task due to people not being as open.

A designer's ability to be empathetic goes a long way and results in better-designed products and experiences due to them understanding where people are coming from and why things are done a certain way. Empathy allows for an outside party, a designer, to provide an experience for business's clients that a business would want.

In short about Zi Jia House's history. A buffet started as an idea amongst friends who have moved to NZ from Thailand and found it hard to find a place to eat out that meets their moral framework, Buddhist veganism. They wanted a place for people to feel at home, wanted for them to enjoy delicious food and come back for said feeling. By creating a buffet that caters to such a specific group of people they want to educate others and make them understand that plant food is freakishly delicious. Their values are as follows: "no suffering, food for everyone, convenience".

That said, there is always a point to which business owners would be open about how they operate and designers can only assume the rest. I feel that it is the case with Zi Jia House but I'm not expressing my unvalidated assumptions here.

Business' key points

We have identified key components about Zi Jia House that would be going on a website that we are working on.

There are 3 different pricing models:

Buffet Price is measured by weight: $2.20 per 100 grams

Combo meal Pre-packed take away containers with a set price tag that varies from day to day but usually is in the ballpark of $10.50-13.50

Daily delight Chef's special, food made to order with a price of $9.90-12.90

Work hours: Mon-Fri 11 AM - 3 PM

"Happy hour": 3 PM - 5 PM After hour pre-packed food offering priced $5.

Tag line: "Healthy ingredients - freshly prepared"

Address and contact number + Map: 43 Chancery Street Auckland, 1010

Phone: 09 358 2926

“Cloudy Apple” studio idea was born on a flight from Dunedin to Auckland 2 days before the semester start, the original makeup of the group was different from what it currently is now, however, the project lives on.

It was first thought of as a side project we can occupy ourselves with that would help develop core skills crucial to our career paths: 1. Finding clients and creating professional relationships with them 2. Digital marketing and/or SEO 4. Further developing web/print design, web development and potentially illustration skills

By beginning doing work under the name "Cloudy Apple", we're unofficially starting a design agency that specialises in "digital solutions", which seems like a broad term but we didn't want a label that would limit a range of services we're planning on offering. Soon-to-be Bachelor of Creative Technologies graduates that have gained various interests through the degree and been able to apply all of them within our work, we didn't want for our professional capability to be defined by a limiting label. If we were to do so, we would be essentially jeopardising ourselves.

Apart from generally being a really open label, here's one example of why "digital solutions" is the most fitting one:

With a slowly growing popularity of AR in the recent years, it would be very unwise to dismiss that career path considering AR hasn't even boomed yet. Cloudy Apple is planning on taking a step in this direction and that is why we are providing a vast range of services, mostly focusing on the web but also everything in between.