Future Oriented Organization

Working, considering Future Oriented Organization, is something very important, since you always want to improve, and that means you must look upfront. Because of that, though, this learning outcome interlaps a lot with Personal Leadership, so kind reader, please consider some of the stuff written here, also being said for the Personal Leadership section of this page.

As for now, while working on our group project, we created a project plan that considers the goals of our project and how we schedule the tasks for it, so we can accomplish the end result. This can be seen in the present pictures.

Week 17

After Christmas our group found a easier way to divide and schedule tasks. The Gantt chart was the main document we followed and the other one we looked trough day by day, and everybody knew what they had to do. You can see it in the picture below. We also agreed on doing a 15 minute standup every day before we started working on the project, so we all know what has to be done, and how will we execute the tasks.

Investigative Problem Solving

Investigative problem solving is a big part of learning and I encounter it daily. That would mean that when I encounter a problem, or something I don't know, I preform research and try to find ways to fix/learn it. In this section I will share some of these moments, but it is impossible to share all of them, since investigative problem solving is something we do all of the time, and this section will get to-big to be readable.

Some of the recent encounters of this phenomenon would be when me and my group were working on our project. After we had the insights from the interviews we performed, we needed to solve the users problems, so we started searching for solutions that are already present online, and to brainstorm on how can we fix those problems ourselves. You can see pictures of that on your left.

Week 15

While I was making my portfolio page, I encountered a lot of problems, most of them being technical. I had quite a few struggles with the positioning of the images and digitalizing the real-life props I made for the site. Because of that I had to do some research and to ask around how should I solve these problems, and so I did. With the help of google and some teachers, I managed to find my way trough.

week 17

This section may be very similar to this. Sorry if you already read it.

Performing some research about my portfolio, by giving it to people, who never saw it, and observing their behavior I noticed that it was a struggle for them to do stuff like scroll all the way up, to navigate to different pages and to know what was a button, and what not.

I had to find a way to fix these problems. In order to do that I created a scroll up button that is always at the bottom of the page, and fits the style, I photoshoped out only the text for the “About Me” section, because it was mistaken as a button, and I also added more buttons at the header, so the user can easily navigate to the different pages faster. Two of the buttons on the main page were also hard to read, so I recreated them, asked around if people can read them, and then replaced them in the website.

Personal Leadership

When it comes to personal leadership, I want to be able to say that I am a man who gets s**t done (excuse me for the vulgar language), who does what's necessary, and not just “his best”, who stands by his words, who progresses and constantly becomes better and who finishes what he has started. The last one is the biggest struggle for me, since I used to never finish the things I had started, which was pulling me down and I didn't really grow.

What did I do to achieve this? So far I have started a daily planner in which I write all the things I want to do for the day, and prioritize them, by urgency and which ones are important for me. I started waking up early, so I could do exercises. Oh, yeah, I also started doing exercises, which I never did before, and am now currently in my best form, I have been my whole life. I started taking track of my finances and creating different sections and saving up money, to invest on myself (for learning and improving my skills). Did I mention I also stopped cigarettes? That was one of the biggest fights I have had, and I am still surprised by myself.

By now I am verry happy with my progress. For the current moment I just need to keep up with what I am currently doing and keep fighting and improving. I still have difficulties with fighting procrastination sometimes, but I am learning to deal with it.

Week 15

Today, I started trying to recreate my digital prototypes into an actual website and realized that I don’t know anything about CSS. I have no idea how to use that thing effectively. So, I made a goal of dedicating at least 2 hours a day to learning HTML and CSS until the 22nd of December, when I travel back to Bulgaria. This way, I should be able to recreate the base of my portfolio prototype on the actual portfolio website by the end of Christmas—or at least I hope so. This goal also aligns with the Interactive Prototypes section of the technical learning outcomes.

Week 17

I completed my goal of week 15 and even made it a bit bigger in the process – that would be at least 2 hours a day learning css, and I am very happy with the results. Currently I am exercising by copying some popular websites like youtube and facebook, and soon I will set a new similar goal to start learning javascript. The site copies you can see below.

Targeted Interaction

A personal goal of mine, related to that learning outcome is to learn how to conduct good user interviews, with which I can gather useful insights, to make the product better, and also to make the customer not annoyed, but feel good about the attention I am giving him, to improve my/the company's reputation and to establish rapport.

So far, in order to achieve this I've read some materials on user research and am currently reading a book on body language (What Every BODY is Saying by Joe Navarro). I also listen to marketing related podcasts that cover that topic, like Nudge and everybody hates marketers.

Putting it in practice for the project plan was pretty interesting. I formed some questions about our project idea and gave them out to my team. Then we all went around the university and interviewed people. I challenged myself to do it with strangers, instead of with people who I already know, because that would be more common in real work environment. On the left you can see some of my questions and the results of the interviews.

Week 15

So, when I shared the prototype of my page, I showed it to some people—my classmates, professors, and my girlfriend. They all pointed out a common issue: it's easy to get confused with the titles and the page buttons, as both are presented as text on crumpled paper, and they were right. So now I need to figure out other options for headings for the different sections, but for until I do, I will just use normal styled headings.

Week 17

As I mentioned earlier I had to ask people around to see my portfolio, and give me their opinion. That was quite fun, because you can see and observe the reactions of people who you don’t know and they see your work for the first time.

Other than that I was also demonstrating our group project to other people in order to see how we can improve it, and that was also really fun.

There is one more thing, but it isn’t related to the university. I went on a street photography challenge, and had to ask complete strangers to take photos of them, just because I “found them interesting”. I am more than happy that I stepped out of my comfort zone, because it was an amazing experience. Some proof and one photograph, you can see below :)

Our team also had retrospective meetings where we talked with eachother about what we liked in the work proccess and what not. Then we decided if we wanted to change something or not.