Belco Alliance is a platform dedicated to supporting student exchange programs by offering valuable resources and partners, promoting international mobility. However, their previous website was outdated, dull looking and featuring broken functionalities and a structure that was not user-friendly.
in your own freedom, redesign the currrent website into something students would not only admire but also find much accesible than the previous website. This must naturally be proper functioning and interactive as well as fun to scroll through.
I ended up in a big and fun group of 6 people. I made sure to help make the trello and keep in track with it with the team. We started off by discussing how we as a team could get engagement for our persona research. I helped with design choices for the belco poster in which we wanted students to scan the QRcode and fill in our survey that the group made together. Initiating was fine but we ended up having absolutely 0 responses till the first meeting with the clients. This turned into a major flop.
by this I mean that i lifted the team with my design choices when it came to making wireframes and prototypes for the redesign. I came up with several ideas from which the group really liked how i wanted to add moving and interactable elements like a carousel effect or the constant use of the Belco colors throughout the pages. I even wanted to try a dark mode since it is part of the norm. I also found 3 different ways to display the contact page. So yes I cooked there. Altough when presented to the clients they told us they prefered what the original white background and that they really liked the design and experimentations. They wanted something what students would like but also something that would allign with their previous webdesign.
after presenting to the client I made sure to stick to my pages and make iterations and version of these. The rest did the same and we asked and gave each other feedback on the comment bubbles on figma. This made us continue with further progression: i worked on perfecting the homepage and contact page and making sure all fonts and margins are consistent on these pages. We finally presented our final prototype redesign to the clients. They were happy with the result and couldn't wait to see the coded version.
It wasn't easy working with such a big group. I did feel like here and there we could've been more open in communication, not just by the end of the project. But while making this project i learnt that sometimes you should listen to what your peers and/or clients want from you. E.g the clients didn't want the dark mode, which to be frank, i really liked but then again, this isn't the only project i am going to work on so i can always bring that with me to the next project. For the rest i enjoyed working with belco's prototypes and bringing new ideas to the table on how the pages could look. I knew this brought me a few steps closer to getting more familiar to figma.
choose either belco education or belco alliance to code the redesign you made in the start stages of the belco project and make this consistent and interactable.
For Belco (dev) I knew what to do: I teamed up together with those people from the last team that were the most efficient to work with. I know sounds shallow, but truth be told, I did not regret my choice. Me, Gabriel and Matthew as a team made an unstoppable trio. Our team agreement was tight and when it came to communication within the team we would stick to it like gorilla glue. I loved working with them not only cuz we were the funniest but also really productive. We finished our self given deadlines on time and followed the Trello strictly. If one of us was late (rarely happened) we would inform one another and bring FRUITS instead of low brain foods like chips/candy. Which in my opinion is already an upgrade. All in all i enjoyed working on this part of the project a lot more which ironically has only code in it.
I made the project plan, team charter and most of the trello. We chose to work on the belco education part and I coded the contact page as well as the modal pop up box for the exchange modules page. The realization kicked later that we did not infact design a modal box since the belco website has a dull looking one. But the point is that they have one. So I on the spot also made a prototype of what the modal box would look like and coded this right away. Every little fixation was being pushed on GIT and we worked accordingly with different html; css and js files so that theres no clash or disruption in code. Afterwards I had a part in a presenting our coded parts and explaining these to the clients. They really liked it.
I learnt a lot! This project was actually fun and the time seemed to be going a lot faster than usual but what I learnt from the dev part of BELCO was mainly how I made the modal pop up. Especially since i am usually the one to run miles away when it comes to working with JS. It took me a while but i really wanted to built the pop up and understand how i can do this with the help of JS. To be honest theres yet things to understand from those youtube tutorials and Stan, but I can proudly say that this project pushed me to create something that not only in the end worked but also had one of the wow factors on to what we made together. Apart from that coding the contact page went pretty well. Here and there i struggled with pushing in GIT since my vsc kept logging me out of it but eventually it all worked out well. And just like i said earlier, i really appreciated working with such a team. It really felt like the dreamteam and i hope i will get to work with more people like this in the near future.