He has the experience of studying in famous overseas schools, excellent work and stable relationship. What made him decide to resign and re study the American undergraduate interaction design course? "In order to explore more possibilities in life!" This answer comes from our case sharer today, Mao. Mao took a firm step to resign and reread his undergraduate studies and headed for the road of studying abroad. With five months of efforts around the clock and the support of teachers in distance teaching, he finally won ACCD, CCA, RIT, SAIC $3000 scholarship, MICA $9000 scholarship, SVA $500 scholarship at one fell swoop, a total of six offers!

　　 Mao reread the American Undergraduate Interaction Design Works Collection, and the wonderful analysis:

　　 01. Resignation and re study of undergraduate requires courage and practical plans

Mao is not a zero based art student. He studied interaction design at Nanyang Institute of Technology in Singapore. After graduation, he worked as a designer in a good company in Singapore. Mao told us that he chose this job because he loved interaction design very much. He hoped to continue to learn relevant skills through specific business practices.

Interaction design is a subject closely related to business and audience Studying in Interaction Design We have also made rapid progress in our work. But at the same time, he also found that his professional accumulation has been difficult to cope with the increasingly complex work, and the design model led by Party A in the work has begun to make him feel limited in growth

Therefore, he decided to study abroad for interactive design, and sought to learn interactive design of professional college systems. Because of his work, Mao also lives in Singapore, so he found the natural light through online channels. At first, Mao just hoped that we could help him sort out the business projects during his work as a collection of interaction design overseas works.

However, after the teacher's professional evaluation of Mao's work, he found that there was still a big gap from the requirements of his Dream School's interactive design portfolio. If the previous project was to be used, it must be greatly changed. At present, the form of expression of these commercial works is still too single, and several more portfolio projects that can better express personal style must be added.

After communicating with Mao's classmates, he also recognized our suggestions and set goals, so the teacher began to make targeted learning plans for Mao without stopping. Although the time left for Mao to prepare his portfolio is not very long, only five months, but Mao has a solid foundation and language foundation, which also saves us a lot of basic courses. So the first step of the learning plan is how to help Mao find the project theme with a personal style.

　　 02. To solve daily problems for girlfriend, "show love" becomes a breakthrough in "finding style"

As for Mao's preference for "showing love", his professional teachers have a deep feeling. In addition to frequently posting photos in the social circle, he also talked about his girlfriend from time to time in the conversation with the teachers. His first project inspiration came from the daily problems of his girlfriend in the conversation with the teacher, It means that there are a lot of clothes, but I feel that I don't have enough clothes every day.

This also gave the teacher inspiration, thinking that insufficient clothes or not knowing how to match them may be a topic that puzzles many young people at present. Can we take this as a "breakthrough", and solve it by using modern technology through Mao's personal experience?

The teacher and Mao students hit it off, and both thought it was a good direction. Now that "customers" and "needs" had been found, the next step was to find design methods. Through the research of "customers" led by his girlfriend, Mao students learned that their confusion could be divided into four points: 1. They often felt that they had no clothes to wear and needed to buy new ones; 2. Don't know how to match; 3. Can't find the existing clothes; 4. It takes too long to choose and match clothes.

Finally, Mao put the goal of the project on building a "smart wardrobe" that can be put into the mobile phone, that is, a complete set of APP design scheme. According to the above four questions, Mao set up four sections in the APP to solve the user's problems from four dimensions: daily matching suggestions, style plans, existing clothing lists, and personal collections.

　　 03. "Girlfriend" comes after "me" to solve the daily problems of "me" as a designer

As a designer, Mao often encountered problems with Party A due to project progress in his work. He wanted to solve them but did not know how to start. In this process, the teacher led him to gradually analyze the diversified causes of the problem, and then chose a major reason as the entry point of design -- the lack of communication between the two sides. The problem is found, but how to optimize the communication process when it comes to implementation?

First of all, Mao analyzed the designer's workflow in detail, found several common and most likely contradictory points in this process, and optimized them one by one. But in the process, the teacher found that Mao often ignored Party A's needs, and the design results could not let Party A get the information he wanted.

On the other hand, it is also because Mao doesn't know what information Party A wants. So the teacher led him to start with psychological analysis, combined with Party A's working status, to analyze what information Party A would like most from different nodes in the docking process.

Based on the needs of both parties, Mao finally made a background system for reporting and communication. The design of the background system is sometimes more difficult than that of 2C products, because the requirements are complex, the user processes are many, and the interface seems boring. However, because of this, the background system can better demonstrate the analysis and design capabilities of interaction designers.

The design of the background system involves a lot of data visualization problems. In data visualization design, the data itself is not important, but the important thing is which method is more reasonable. So in the early stage of the design, the teacher tried every means to help Mao students understand what both users want to know from the data, or what they want to convey through the data, Take this requirement as the first priority, and then consider which chart should be used to reflect the data around this requirement. This design result is not only reasonable, but also an optimal platform to show Mao's design thinking.

　　 04. The reinterpretation of the work has witnessed every step of his down-to-earth progress

Through the collection creation of the previous two new projects, Mao also felt the design idea completely different from the work in the process, and had a deeper understanding of interaction design, so he also recreated the design projects in the previous work. Let's take a look at the other three projects:

The first project was a website design. At that time, Mao's client was Subway. They needed to create an online ordering website to improve their business performance. At that time, the program only provided ordering and delivery services for Subway, and the visual performance was relatively simple.

Later, during the transformation process, Mao also added user customization to restore the offline ordering mode, so that users can choose ingredients and flavors independently, and also added more page designs.

Another project is also a web design, which was designed by Mao for the "Singapore FinTech Festival" in his work last year. The design needs to provide a platform for cooperation, contact and cooperation creation in Singapore and even the global FinTech ecosystem.

When professional teachers evaluated the works of Mao students, they thought that the visual scheme of this set of works was chaotic. For example, the calendar part of the previous web page would display a whole month's date on the same page, but the useful data for users was only one or two days, so it was difficult to find the visual focus.

In the later design scheme, Mao designed a new modern style according to the modification opinions. For the calendar page, it only keeps the relevant date of the event. For the effective information of other pages, the table layout has been redesigned, and the appropriate page has also been designed for the presentation of the mobile terminal.

In addition, Mao's undergraduate work collection of American interaction design also includes a work of observational painting. Of course, he did not miss the opportunity to show his love. In addition to drawing photos with his girlfriend, he also has his own self portrait and campus sketches.

Finally, we need to remind you that, Art study abroad Many people may choose to use their previous works as a project in the collection of works for studying abroad. This work may be an assignment in college or a project at work, but you must not use it directly when choosing. First of all, from the perspective of specifications, there are many differences between the collection of works for studying abroad and other forms of works in terms of layout and inspection points; In addition, whether the quality of the works meets the standard is also the key point that we need to consider. Although the collection of Mao's undergraduate interactive design works in the United States that we shared today also includes two projects in the work, it is also because Mao has very rich experience and deep professional foundation, and the two works he selected are qualified in terms of quality, However, Mao did not directly copy them, but made targeted adjustments and improvements with the help of professional teachers.

Natural light shares more topics for you:

American interactive design collection focuses on creative ideas, collection training, and college recommendation

Kame interaction design, how to apply for Carnegie Mellon University interaction design

This article belongs to the original article of Natural Light International Art Education Team. Without permission, it cannot be reproduced commercially in any form. If it is found, it must be investigated for legal responsibility.