IIDCON

Overall I enjoyed the conference.  All of the speakers were engaging and had interesting stories. Some big themes that I pulled away from the talks were that life doesn't follow a linear path, be engaged in your community, and do your research. Todd Miller’s story was particularly inspiring to me. He constantly knew how much he was worth and wasn’t afraid to ask for more, and now he is very successful. Sometimes I doubt my worth (as a designer) and I’m not sure of the value of my work. So being confident in my work is something I have to work on. I also liked a point that the Newswanger’s brought up. They said don’t pursue passion pursue curiosity. They said that you should always be trying new things and be curious. If you don’t repeat yourself you can’t burnout. Going into the conference I had four prepared questions, but my questions changed after hearing everyone present. I asked my question for Bri during the Q and A so I ended up with answers from everyone. My question for her was, “why start your own company when you had lots of other employment opportunities?” Everyone’s answers really boiled down to freedom. Freedom to choose the jobs you like, freedom from bad leaders, and freedom from toxic coworkers. My question for the Newswanger’s was if they made a decision to do work with nonprofits or if that was just how it panned out. They definitely consciously choose to work with non-profits. Even though there is less money in working with them they felt that it was important to work with a client who was making a difference in the world. I spent most of my time after the conference talking with Doug Logan. We talked about working with clients.  Specifically about shaping your clients decisions by what options you present them. By carefully selecting only good choice for the client you can help move them in a direction that you want without seeming like you're forcing them into a choice. This can even happen in early stages of development.  An example might be, when having them choose words to describe their company only present them with certain options on a theme. I unfortunately did not get a chance to talk to Todd Miller. My question for him was, “Do you jump into marketing on a new form of social media right away, or do you wait till it is established?” based on his talk I got the feeling that Wawa is a little more conservative so they might wait until something is established before they invest money into marketing on it.

Week 1 out of class

   This week out of class I read two articles, What is a Product Designer  and Tarantioning our First App. The first article as its title suggests answers the question, what is a product designer? The author shows a product designer as a design jack of all trades. They're someone who knows UI/UX design, tradition graphic design, some coding, etc. They will over see a product from start to finish, and then even after finish into its actual life span. Another key point the author makes is that a product designer will not solve your problems as a company, but will instead solve your users problems, which will in turn solve your problems before they even become problems. The second article I read was about the author's experience with the first mobile phone application they made, or in this case failed to make. His first idea was a lecture recording app called Lec. Lec centered around the idea of being able to set key points in a recording to jump to, and his team fixed on a design that put these key points around a circle. The moral of story was that his team put style over user experience and the app was never completed for sometime. His team then made another simpler app that did fairly well, and with this new found knowledge they managed to finish Lec by focusing on simplicity for the user. The connection to Tarantino was that Tarantino started Pulp Fiction but it was too complicated so he made Reservoir Dogs, and then returned to Pulp Fiction when he was more experienced. Additionally outside of class I came up with thirty problems/ app ideas. My partner and I each came up with thirty ideas so we'll have sixty to choose from next week.

Most of my ideas come from small problems or things I wished I had. None of them are really profound or likely to shake up the market at all, but they are all things that I think might be useful to at least a few people. Some of my best ideas here I think are Commute time calculator, Yelp for Trials, and city architecture/facts buddy.