On Thursday 28th January my team and I participated in a trade fair competition held in Kingston University’s Business School. This was the first time I had ever been a part of something like this so I was extremely nervous about what to expect. My team and I did not have a prototype so we went into the Trade Fair with different objectives to the other groups. Our main objective was to carry out research and this is where we went wrong. As i mentioned in my reflective blog if i could have done this all over again I would have ensured my team had a prototype from the early stages so that we can test it and gain relevant feedback at this stage. Instead, we produced surveys and questionnaires to hand out so that we can gain more information about our target group in the attempt to produce the best possible product for them.
Before this date I had attended a Bright Ideas Sprint Weekend whereby we were educated on how we can enable our products to grow and how we can get our product in the right hands. I also spent the weekend constructing a value proposition model for our comic and this gave me further gains of the people we aim to serve. Unfortunately it was still too late to create a prototype but i left the weekend with further deign thinking knowledge.
By this point we had commissioned a animator to help us but due to an unfinished storyline, so we were not able to meet the deadline. This lead to the following takeaways;
- In an article written by Shanuj Mishra in UXdesign, he notes the importance of prototyping your product to help identify and formulate the main trajectory of the design in order to save time. Time was our biggest constraint and I feel as though if my the Trade Fair we had our prototype we would have been able to progress better and more smoothly by the Dragon’s Den. Mishra identified a few main reasons behind prototyping; 1. the prototype gives the target group a complete idea of how the comic will look in the final result, 2. it allows us to streamline the design development process, focusing on important interface elements, 3, at the prototyping stage, it is possible to identify unnecessary elements that are best abandoned, 4, having a prototype in hand, would allows us to more clearly represent our start-up idea and this was the main facet of the Trade Fair.
- Practice makes perfect – we failed to win any awards during any stages of the whole process and this was due to the lack of practice, i truly believe if we nailed our pitch we would have had a shot at the “best sales team award”. I feel as though my team were not confident enough in our pitch and with practice his could have been different.
- Learn to work effectively on feedback given – without feedback there is a lack of direction so it is important to listen carefully to any feedback given and act accordingly. However, throughout the person i learnt that different people will give different feedback even though they may contradicting themselves but it is important to take whatever it is you can and apply it the idea.
It was a good event all in all, my team and I enjoyed ourselves, it was also a major wake up call to us all but this is what life is about, you take lessons from every situation you’re in.
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