Participating in pre-season badminton was a great re-introduction to my favourite sport. I definitely noticed a big difference in my performance this year compared to last year as I spent more time in the gym during the off-season. This allowed me to build my stamina and improve my strength. The most noticeable improvements were in my agility, flexibility and accuracy. I’m glad that these changes occurred as I don’t want a repeat of last year, I want to improve and prove that I am of equal skill to my friends.

Firstly, I would like to reflect on learning outcome 1. I feel that my strengths in badminton are teamwork as I am able to communicate with my teammate through audio cues such as “split”, “square” and “yours”. These single word phrases, while short, are highly effective in conveying vital information quickly. This would reduce confusion and allow us to coordinate better. I am also very focused and determined during my matches, always ensuring that I am paying attention to my opponent’s potential moves and never giving up. I feel that I have definitely developed my abilities in my areas of growth. I am now, relatively, more agile, flexible, fast and my reflexes have also improved. Some skills that are less developed are my hitting skills and the variety of techniques under my belt. There are several advanced techniques that I wish to attempt but they are a lower priority compared to foundational skills like speed.

Lastly, for learning outcome 7, I made sure to consider the implications of my behaviour during a badminton match. I demonstrated good conduct by remaining quiet between each point, not show-boating or being overly noisy and bumping fists with my opponent and congratulating them on a good game.

Career contacts have ended and this experience has been extremely fruitful, to say the least. I have learnt a lot of skills especially using online tools and conducting user research based on secondary and primary sources. On the example of this is when I used google analytics to determine which age demographics we should target our new marketing outcome to.  From our findings, we found that 32.47% of users are between 25-34 years old and 18.83% of users are between 18-24 years old. These 2 age demographics make up the majority of users which is why we decided to target our marketing and engagement activities towards them. Despite these 2 age demographics making up the majority of active and new users, their average session duration and bounce rate are disturbingly low compared to the older age demographics. The bounce rate and Average session duration are 80% and 53 seconds respectively for 18-24-year-olds and 71.7% and 50 seconds respectively for 25-34-year-olds. Looking at Tribe Tours Instagram page and website, it is easy to see there is little engagement because the amount of information is overwhelming and users can’t interact with any Instagram quizzes, polls, etc. Consequently, we decided to implement photobooths, single-page infographics and Instagram posts/stories to better engage these younger age demographics. We chose these products as they were visually appealing and easy to share on social media.

Another form of user research that we undertook was participating in the Chinatown murder mystery tour ourselves. We discovered that too much time was allocated for each puzzle and there wasn’t enough time to take memorable pictures with the cultural sites. We felt that better engagement can be achieved if participants are given the opportunity to create more memorable pictures by posing with funny signs and if they can share single-page infographics detailing the tour.

This fundamental digital skill fundamental course allowed us to learn about user interviews which is a skill that is applicable to any project that we may undertake in the future. Learning about digital skills such as digital marketing and building no-code websites/apps using Figma, Bubble and Wix will also be very important in the future. This digital skills course does not influence the career path we envision since these skills will be universal for almost every job.

I think some areas for improvement is that despite us effectively using secondary and primary research such as the words of Yock Song, our experience participating in the tour and google analytics to devise ideas for products, we failed to test the prototypes on any users. We should have taken what we learnt from planning a UX research session such as creating a research objective relating to our prototype and finding suitable research participants. Speaking to them would have allowed us to refine our user personas and modify our products to suit them better. Usability testing also would have allowed us to see our prototype in action and how well it performs.

As for learning outcome 3, we built on the idea of tribe tours to target younger age demographics by developing a more engaging and visual social media campaign.

Career contacts ended with a final presentation back to the leaders of the program and the business itself where we demonstrated the changes we would like to make to their social media marketing.

If I were, to be honest, the digital skills week has been challenging and bordering on overbearing. I knew that I would be giving up a decent chunk of time for this course and I agreed to dedicate ten hours a week. However, I wasn’t expecting that we will be going through a 77 lesson course based on 4 digital skill pillars plus 2-hour meetings from Tuesday to Saturday and deliverables. This sheer amount of work meant that I had to cut some corners and miss out on deliverables, especially considering that I am still balancing school work and my personal health.

Compared to a week ago, I am more aware of the expectations of this course and the skills that are becoming increasingly important in today’s digital world. However, the backlog of work means that I have much to catch up on when December break rolls around on the 18th because I am prioritising schoolwork over, what I like to call, non-essential deliverables (deliverables that do not directly contribute to the SMEs product solution).

The skills that we focused on during the digital skills week included UI, UX, web development and digital marketing. My final product was an app designed on the no-code app developer called Bubble.io. This product, called FoodSmart, would include several functions including an Instagram-esque post and comment system, a series of short articles listing ways that users can reduce food waste and an online pantry in which users can input the ingredients they have and receive recipes.

One of the 2 takeaways from the digital skills weeks was the importance of user interaction. I learnt that communicating users was one of the most vital parts of starting any project. It is essential to prove that there is a need for your product, otherwise, any additional effort spent on it would be a waste. I learnt about the main stages of a user interview. At the start of a design project, when you’re developing a new concept or still deciding which direction the design should take. Speaking to your target users one-to-one will help with things like defining user personas or deciding which product features to include. First, there must be a concept or design in its early stages. Further along in the process, user interviews can help you to gather people’s opinions about an existing product or design. User interviews can be used as a follow-up to other kinds of user research, such as usability testing (where you’ll observe a user interacting with a product or prototype). In this case, a user interview will add verbal, self-reported data to the actions and behaviours you’ve observed — helping you to paint a comprehensive picture of your users in relation to the product you’re designing. For my UI research, it was largely centred around the ingredients that users may want to be able to input to find appropriate recipes. I also asked them about the cuisine that they enjoy the most so that I could describe recipes that make use of leftover or commonly discarded ingredients that incorporate Chinese flavours which are the most popular cuisines. I also wanted to understand the difficulties that experienced home cooks faced and the ingredients they commonly bought which I can include in my short articles. The problem statement was how to make the process of reducing food waste more efficient. The pain point was that there were few platforms that allowed users to customize their recipes, offered helpful tips on reducing food waste and allowed people to encourage each other to cook by showing off their own cooking. First I conducted a survey asking a series of questions that investigated the frequency that people checked their pantries for expired goods, which foods they most frequently throw away, which foods they least frequently throw away, food allergies, ingredients that they always have in their pantries, etc. This survey respondents were mostly middle-aged housewives that were avid homecooks. It only made sense to get their opinion as they would have the best experience and knowledge of cooking in a kitchen. All these questions were to gain a better understanding of what ingredient categories to include and what my short informative articles would revolve around. To synthesize my data, I used the provided organisational tool such as bar charts and pie charts to understand which answers were most popular.

A second takeaway is the importance of a good UX. I learnt that UX makes people feel comfortable and encourages continuous iteration and prototyping to reduce risk in product development. I learnt about the double diamond model and how to design the right thing and how to design it right. I didn’t have sufficient time to apply my knowledge to my app and it’s designed. But I was able to apply the most basic ways of organising information. I was able to highlight the importance of certain categories by placing them at the bottom and highlighting them in green and having the font be red, which immediately sets them apart from the rest of the page’s content. These icons are also clickable and can bring users to their preferred site. Each search box and button is also clearly labelled to reduce confusion. Since this is only a prototype, I resorted to a very linear and column-like arrangement for my page elements since it is the most simplistic. In relation to borders and spacing, I ensured that every element was consistently spaced from another to make it more aesthetically pleasing. If I were to conduct user interviews on my UX, I would set goals and objectives (What makes an effective UX for a recipe app?), Recruit interview participants (UX experts and app developers), avoid industry jargon and make people feel at ease.

How do you plan to use what you have learned in the weeks to come and beyond?

I plan to use these digital skills in any profession that I enter. The coaches made it abundantly clear at the beginning of the course that these skills will only become more important as technology advances. Some skills don’t even revolve around technology as much as they focus on communication and other social skills. While digital skills will become more relevant in the workplace, collaboration between people will become equally, if not more, important. In my SMEs solution, I can use my newly obtained knowledge about digital marketing and user interviews to identify needs and wants and how to best address that through advertising.

This pertains to the planning of the upcoming marketing proposal presentation and strategies.