Our former group wanted to work on an app where it would help pet adoption sites keep all their adoption animals in the convenience of an app. The main features that we were thinking about where the volunteer scheduling system as well as the adoption database.
Our first problem statement did not garner a lot of support because it did not present a clear problem and there it was harder to imagine a solution:
Professor Ashenfelder recommended that we looked into Cracker Box Palace at Historic Alasa Farm since they wanted to use our expertise in visual and website design to better their brand identity.
Even though it was still a very broad problem but since we were going to be working with a client, it was going to be an ongoing conversation that we were willing to have and experience during this capstone.
We were able to connect with their Board and other staff members to discuss about their plans. In the process, a brand identity committee was created in order to officially include our team.
Even when we started working with a client and had regular communication with them, we quickly realized that they were not on the same pace as our course. We had more structure in the set of deliverables that we had to complete for this course, but our client had longer term goals; which also meant that they were not able to provide everything we needed at the time of our due dates.
To avoid having to do double the amount of work to satisfy our client and our course, we kept close communication with Professor Ashenfelder and made sure that she was CC'ed in all the emails that we were having with our client.
After that, we also communicated with them about our course deliverables and also provided them with a list of deliverables to hand to us so that we could continue our development process. For instance, we had a few emails that were specifically about the website structure and we needed more pictures from the client in order to convey their thoughts on highlighting their main aspects.
All in all, there were a lot of communication differences that we noted and had to adapt throughout the process. But nevertheless, it was great that we were able to work with an external organization as our client and get a taste of what it might be like to work as a member of a design firm!
Even though it might have seemed like a big switch to start with working on an app to working on the brand identity of an organization, we were still able to work on something that we were all passionate about–which is animals!
Working with a client gave us a realistic sense on how workplace communication might be like, and we are very grateful that we had still had the capstone course as a spring board to bounce back if there were any miscommunications throughout the process. We would highly encourage this type of client experience to anyone! 🤓