My Reflection #AppleDeveloperAcademy Part VI: Design, Visual Assets, Education

Hi everyone, this is my sixth reflection about Apple Developer Academy!

In this final project, I have an opportunity to immerse myself in design related. It is indeed interesting!

This time, I’ve improved quite a lot compared to before, because I also draw some stuffs to be used as visual assets. It’s like a combination of UI/UX Designer and Graphics Designer? I am not really used to digital drawing to be honest, so this is something really new for me. I used iPad Pro 11 inch 2nd Generation, Apple Pencil 2nd Generation and Sketchbook app to draw visual assets. I would say drawing with iPad now is very promising, the experience is almost the same as when I was drawing manually on a paper.

This is also my final project, which means this is probably a project with hardest challenge probably, since we were given around 3 months of timeline for researches and development. At first, we were stuck to find the biggest problem in society related to Education but finally we found one. Probably it took 40% of our time for researches alone, the rest goes to development phase.

We decided to create an app to help students in finding their suitable major based on their interest, called “Juraku”. If you are not from Indonesia, unfortunately, you cannot experience using this app since the target user of this app is for Indonesian. The major lists and the user interface, uses Indonesian so that Indonesian can use this app without prior knowledge of english language.

That’s not all, we are taught on how to effectively publish this app on the AppStore and increases its ranking in the AppStore. Also, storytelling presentation methodology, and et cetera, there were a lot that I almost forgot all of it if I had to recall one by one.

There are many obstacles in this final project, like my health issues in that time, that hinders me from working at my maximum capacity. And also, my thesis.

Well if you asked me how was it being a designer? I would happy and regret about it at the same time. I am happy because designing is simply.. my passion? I could say that because the most of things that I do lately is sketching and thinking about UX stuffs (I even got a freelance work to design an app, aiming for simplicity). But I also regretted being an UI/UX Designer because my background is a programmer (IT Major), not a designer, so it’s just.. something is so wrong when I could be a programmer but I chose to be a designer instead. Well there’s nothing that I can do about it anyway. Even though I am practically more of a designer now, I can still code my own app in the future, to be used as portfolio (and probably I will use it myself since I am aiming to make useful and simple apps).

But of course, we ended this project well. We were presenting to Apple Team, and they don’t really against our app and gives us feedbacks instead. After that, we took our team photos along with our mentor together.

I also got constructive feedback from my team when we are debriefing. I have a long way to go. But I realized that I am not at my maximum potential in this project because of my health issue that time, so I decided to exercise and sport, eating more fruits and vegetables, to make my life healthier!

That’s all. Since this is my final project, finally I have more than enough time to relax a little bit!