Author Archives: Kevin Pham

Personal Blog: Slight design changes, big improvement!!

This week and last our group worked independently for the most part on our own tasks. As the designer, then, I was fixing up some minor pieces of our UI. I was also getting great feedback from my teammates on ways we could make the Ui more pleasant and fun, and so I incorporated those ideas. Because of these changes, the UI is looking better than ever! Really excited to see how things shape up when the final product comes out.

Something that was new for me was the design to development handoff process WITHOUT the backing of a large and complex technical (and design systems) infrastructure. I work for a mid-to-large sized tech company, and so the handoff is usually quite simple: I create designs in Figma, scope out design specs, and give it to the engineers. However, given this project has just two developers, it was a learning experience to think about how things had to be handed off when there aren’t pre-developed components that the developer can easily plop into their code. As such, I’m really thankful to Joanne and Eva for working through the nits and finding ways to make everything work. Overall: very excited for what’s to come!!

FOS* Group Project Update #2

This week, the FOS* team managed to complete a lot of the milestones that we’d set before spring break. Joanne and Eva completed the dataset, Kevin finished mid-fi wireframes, and Martin has been consistently keeping up our social media platforms. Additionally, we’ve finished selecting and purchasing a domain for our site, as well as completed our branding (logos, color scheme, fonts). We’ve also, of course, been creating and sharing memes with each other as well. As of now, we’re just fleshing out the details on both the data and design side of things.

Once again, we’re not particularly concerned about time, given the amount of leeway we baked into our schedule. As things are becoming completed, we’re now at a stage where we simply need to flesh out nits and details, and pull everything (dataset, designs, external resources) together into a cohesive whole. The fact that we’ve selected our domain and completed our branding helps in doing this work of making things feel put together. 

We’re also still meeting on Sundays for the most part, though we’ve found that scheduling things on a weekly basis based on our ever-changing personal schedules has been good. We also amp up the amount of meetings per week based on what we need to get done, which hasn’t been a problem either. We’ve also found it helpful to even just work independently on our own tasks in the Discord space together, and ask for feedback or ideas as we go.

By the end of the week, we are aiming to:

  • complete high-fidelity wireframes for the website
  • finish our topic modeling and get started on code scaffolding
  • plan outreach strategy for next week
  • Get started on writing web copy

Post Spring Break personal blog

The break was really nice, in the sense that I had a chance to catch up on finishing mid-fi wireframes for our project. While I definitely used the majority of the break to relax, I took a couple nights to hunker down and focus on completing the wireframes on Figma. This process entailed not only designing key screens for the wireframes and creating a simple prototype with Figma, but also meant deciding on key components, interactions, and page structures that we can convert into assets, and utilize moving forward as we create individual pages for each freedom of speech-related case.

I’m planning to spend the remainder of this week to convert my teammates’ feedback to fleshing out final details and finishing up high-fidelity wireframes. I’m excited to get these wireframes out of the way, so that Joanne and Eva can start development, and all of us can get more into the weeds of web copywriting. Overall, I think we’re on-time in regards to schedule, so I’m happy with where we’re at!

Personal Blog Post — Landing Page and other things

This week was good, and I feel a lot better than last week mentally (given everything that happened). I was able to put together a fun little landing page, a color scheme, typography standards, and finalized logos/characters for the team. After handing off the landing page design, Eva and Joanne really pulled through—and so quickly! It was nice to see things start to come together, and I’m happy with how understanding and cooperative my teammates are. I’m also looking forward to putting more dedicated time in this week into finalizing some mid-fi wireframes for the site experience, and hopefully start doing some final iterating by beginning of April. Luckily, having decided on colors and typography already, the designing should come a lot easier moving forward. It seems to be a just a matter of standardizing what particular pages look like (ex. the page for a particular case, vs. the home page), and how transitions will happen. I’m excited to eventually get into micro-interaction work as well.

Also excited about the launch of our social media pages! S/O to the team for putting together really great content and memes. Martin spearheaded a lot of the logistical work in the process, which was really nice. Excited to see where these pages go!

Personal Journal Entry #2 — Bio and Contribution

Kevin is a first-year MA in Digital Humanities student, and holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley. His research generally sits at the intersection of race, critical theory, and the history of digital culture and media, and is interested in exploring theoretical interventions within the Digital Humanities. Additionally, Kevin is a product designer in the tech industry, professionally; as such, he leads the design team on the Freedom of Speech* project, and is also a part of the research team. His primary contributions will be to lead design ideation, produce high-fidelity wireframes for the website, and create the project’s key pieces of branding.

Personal Journal Entry #1 – Kevin

Our group was quite productive in this first week of working together. Off the bat, it was really easy to define our roles and responsibilities considering our respective backgrounds: Eva and Joanne has developer-heavy roles, Martin is taking on on project management, and I’m in charge of our UX/UI vision/wireframing. We are also dividing outreach and research responsibilities. Because we were able to easily define our goals and responsibilities, creating the collaborator’s agreement was quite easy and straightforward. In regards to working on the project itself, we spent a lot of our time so far just working through technical needs and going through data. Because this isn’t up my ally in particular, nor is it a specialty of mine, I was bit more hands-off, while Eva and Joanne did most of this work.

In terms of the project proposal, and I could tell just from working on that together (dividing work, communicating uncertainties, fleshing out details) that we would make a good group. We were able to easily bounce ideas off each other, think of new ways to communicate our project, and define a pretty good path moving forward. Overall, I’m happy with how much we’ve accomplished and defined already, and that we now have a pretty solid vision of what we want to create and how we should go about doing it. 🙂

Skills – Kevin

Design/UX: I’m strongest here. My day job is as a product/UX designer for a mid-sized tech company, so I have substantial experience with UX design tools (Figma, Sketch, InVision, etc.) and methodologies (UX research, sketching, prototyping, UX writing, etc.). On that note, I also have visual design skills, so I am pretty acquainted with the Adobe Creative Suite, including Illustrator (graphic design), After Effects (animation), Lightroom (photo editing), InDesign (layout design), and a little Photoshop.

Developer: Familiar with HTML and CSS. Not an expert at either, but know how to work with them. Other than that, not much developer experience.

Research: I have both academic and UX research experience; the latter more than the former. I do user research (interviews, surveys, diary studies, data analysis, etc.) for work and also did it in undergrad. In terms of academic research, I took a research methodologies class in undergrad for my thesis, though since my interests are mainly theory-based—so I don’t really have the research expertise of a social scientist.

Project manager: I have not done this before, though there are project managers at my company that I work extensively with. I think that I’d be able to take what I know from what they do and transfer that understanding into a project.

Outreach: I have not done this before, nor do I think I’d be the person to do this (i.e. I have social anxiety).