Budgeting for StudentConnected’s First Year!

One of the most important steps for small companies is the budgeting – get this wrong and it could easily destroy your pool of money for launching your product. In my instance I am going to be creating a budget for one whole year of solid 9-5, 5 days a week workload and the money needed to keep a float. Costs of office space, equipment, software and stationary amongst other things.

You can see my budget by downloading the table below:

Budget

In total it would cost over £36,000 to run ‘studentconnected’ for an entire year from start to a finished product that is ruthlessly maintained to offer the best service to the UK’s universities.

Creating the ‘studentconnected’ Brand.

It is important to note that branding is one of the most crucial segments to creating a company that will represent the passion, ideas and concept behind the product.

App Icon:

Creating an icon that would stand for studentconnected’s vision on what it means to produce an app that allows students and tutors work to their most productive through a simplified system of functionality and aesthetic would be quite an open ended brief. To help myself design this icon I decided to give myself some rules that I would have to follow and if I really needed to, I could break them. They were:

  1. Colourful
  2. Streamlined & Flat Style
  3. Simple
  4. Showcase Creativity

I chose to follow these rules as I believe that these will serve as guidelines to accurately represent studentconnected’s vision; a colourful and creative icon assisting to signify the creative visual students who would be using the app and the projects that they create for the university. The steamlined, flat and simple style was interesting to me as I did research into what current brands are doing with their own logos and app icons. It turns out that many of them have gone down the path of dropping sharp edges, sans-serifed and pastel/flat colours with next to no gradients. This is something that I incorporated into my app icon.

App Icon Version 1:

 


StudentConnected App 2 StudentConnected App 1

I designed these two icons helping keep within my rules and guidelines I set upon myself. I used a university cap as its universally recognised for its higher education connotations, polygons were used to create the lowpoly effect seen in many creative outputs such as 3D modelling – while demonstrating contrast in the background.  Two different colour themes were used to showcase what differentiating styles would look like.

Logo:

Finding the definition of a good and a bad logo seems like it would be quite easy, however once you’ve got past the clearly blatant bad logos and start looking towards the multi-million pound companies that you see daily; you begin to look really in-depth as to the quality and thought put into and some of the elements behind the logo.

 

To me a good logo is something that represents the company in a clear and concise way, this should be done in two ways:

  1. The first is to have a logo that’s elements make up what you stand for, whether that be Costa Coffee, with their coffee beans boldly at the forefront of their logo or Wikipedia’s world built up of connecting jigsaw pieces with various written languages on.
  2. The second would be a logo that can stand by itself and be acknowledged clearly by the public domain. Perfect examples are Nike, Apple & Facebook, without the need for text cluttering up some products. Nike and Apple, are great at this with Apple’s iMac’s and iPhone’s clear black logo on the fore front of the products design. It’s instantaneous, you know who it is – Nike are the same with their famous tick on shoe boxes & TV advertisements.

 

I initially began creating a mood board of different fonts that I found visually appealing that looked sleek and simplified as mentioned above; these fonts were chosen with students and education in mind to help make sure that the two would fit with the apps general aesthetic.

 

Logo

Eliminating the fonts was fairly easy as I wanted a font that would work as one single word with no spaces or caps lock – this was a concious choice to separate studentconnected from other brands within the market such as Black Board. These were the shortlisted typefaces that really stood out to me, I found that most of them had a similar feel to them and looked like light or bold versions of each other. This made it even easier to cut down. The final font that I chose was the last on the list.

Logo_Shortlist

I was very fond of the app icon as a logo that would stand for itself as an image however a university cap is quite difficult to use as a synonymous brand. This is why I decided to incorporate it within the logo but with something directly linked to studentconnected. I aimed for an all lower case, no space literal spelling of ‘studentconnected’ with the university cap placed ontop of a letter. This logo will still be worked on as I am not 100% happy with the look of the logo and feel that it could be improved greatly.

 

Logo_Final

 

Within a future blogpost I will talk about future improvements & alterations to this logo.

Proposed Schedule for Deadlines

Over the next few weeks I have a lot of specific areas I need to focus on to reach my intended designation of StudentConnected’s creation – in my proposal I listed a brief schedule that I would be looking at occasionally to remind myself what work needs to be done. This was a decision to help keep myself on track and to hit very specific goals throughout this process.

The proposal schedule looked like this:

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I have since expanded on this timeline to include every single task that needs to be completed within my R&D file and the feedback analysis after the hand in.

I will continue to update this schedule through the process until Week 12.

You can see this new schedule by downloading here:

Schedule

StudentConnected’s Concept

The concept is one issue that I believe I have not yet made 100% clear what I am aiming to achieve. So far I have talked about the app in a broad range of issues & features, I want to dedicate this focus on that within this blog post.

I wish to create an app to improve the functionality and visual style of Blackboard – ‘studentconnected’ aims to be a companion app that installs new features, improves the graphical design of the app and increases functionality within the app aiming to enhance the average university students experience. Within my proposal I have stated that Blackboard, an educational web portal and learning management system is a definitive inspiration for Student Connected and what it aims to achieve.

To impact productivity & time management positively through the use of creating a simple, fast and effective digital outlet that helps educate, inform and organize university students through faster & smarter learning. The end result of the project is to be left with a digital app that at its core is designed to help university students manage their education easier, helping to save time throughout the day to focus on additional tasks assisting in advancing the individual’s skillset.

It will put the student in a place of power, allowing to customize their workload; letting them see what work needs to be done, when it’s due in and the tasks required to reach that end goal. Alongside offering additional optional articles, videos and audio bytes by tutors to be educated by in a streamlined, easy-to-use & aesthetically pleasing design that entices the student to come back & work harder.

 Why create this app?

Education is subjective, everyone learns at their own speeds in different ways and the best way to accommodate that is to create an environment that sets itself up to be customizable, supporting different styles. Being able to take ownership of your own education and deciding when you complete a task and how you will digest the information presented to you will allow you to thrive. Everyone knows their own learning styles and this app is designed to help hone in on what specifically allows you to have that learning style and adjust the workload to it.

Teachers teach in different manners but the same end goal is there no matter what the delivery. However we can’t pick and choose our tutors and most online information is already created for the masses. StudentConnected aims to help teachers teach you what you need to know without ineffective interfaces and unpromising learning styles that may not fit you. A metaphor to describe it – this app assists in giving you the finest boots, best stamina and leg power to score without ever having to move the goalposts. The app uses powerpoints from lectures and seminars for the conventional method in a shiny new way while also tutoring students individually by pulling from a pool of extra resources, a program that tests students on what they know and more importantly adapts to the way that they learn over time by comparing the effectiveness of different videos, articles and tests to discover, scientifically what works best. Statistical information like this can be used by teachers to fine tune their presentations and methods of teaching.

This app is an improvement of current apps in the market such as ‘Blackboard’ which visually and structurally is undesirable, with ruthless design, no personality or flair and a lack of options to interact with the work presented. StudentConnected aims to bridge the conventional educational apps with the feel and positive progression as seen in other educational apps like Duolingo and Code Academy. Both of which have been proven to engage younger individuals and adults [1]. Apps like these are slowly increasing and StudentConnected fits into this category of being an alternative to the mundane and boring, helping to encourage students to feel rewarded. With the likes of Adobe Generation & Khan Academy having millions invested into them it is a very real possibility that tools such as StudentConnected are helping strive towards a digital classroom or a hybrid between the two to fully engage with everything that there is to offer.

The app will look at the following types of learners and allow tutors as well as students to customize their work and how they consume information:

  • Sensing learners
  • Visual learners
  • Active learners
  • Sequential learners

This idea came from a video created by CGPGrey who delved into what the future of education may look like. A digital Aristotle as he calls it is a platform that all students will use to be educated in a specific way to them that will allow them to grow at 10x the pace than they would being sat in a class of 30 learning from one teacher. Bringing these different learning styles into this app I feel is a way of moving us closer to that destination. You can watch his video here:

This is an important part of the app which will be discussed in detail in a future blog post regarding the apps visual interfaces.

Critical Analysis on Blackboard’s Visual & Functionality & Survey Results

Critical Analysis on Blackboard’s Visual & Functionality & Survey Results

Within my proposal I have stated that Blackboard, an educational web portal and learning management system is a definitive inspiration for Student Connected and what it aims to achieve. Student Connected is built to work alongside Blackboard as an addon service that will enhance the average university students experience – this next section will delve into the service and why it has prompted Student Connected’s creation.

Used by tutors and students, Blackboard is one of the UK’s largest services for hosting educational material and is used daily by millions up and down the country, however Blackboard’s functionality is one of the main issues found with both tutors and students alike. This knowledge was gained through a survey recently taken at the university of Lincoln and by students attending other college’s of arts such as Cardiff University. The site’s visual and functionality problems tend to be one and the same, with layouts and organisation systems in place across that site that jeopardize the entire learning management system for their students.

Blog Responses

Modules are spread so thin within multiple folders, sections and files which makes it incredibly easy to get lost and miss crucial information. Throughout multiple responses that I received it was clearly noted that most of the issues stemmed from the structure of the website and how Blackboard visually gets this information across to the user. This is something that I’ve had to deal with countless times and have found myself opening 6 or 7 different folders within a single tab when the document I am looking for is in a completely different tab within another 4 or 5 folders. I aim to work around this issue within Student Connected as its a concept that if solved would immediately solve a lot of issues found within Blackboard.

As each year passes more modules get added onto Blackboard, these modules appear frequently with similar names making it difficult to distinguish between a first year Digital Media module & a second year Digital Media module.

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Submitting essay’s and files to Blackboard can be incredibly difficult for students at times, primarily due to the layout of the webpage and the many links that need to be clicked before reaching the submission page. Having a system that can act in this way is reckless and doesn’t offer the best service for students – especially on deadline day where any submission even if a mistake is registered and counted. This will be taken into consideration when designing interface that students and tutors will be interacting with.

 

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I personally find that Blackboard is a service that has the possibility to be incredibly useful and informative to both students and a platform for tutors to distribute content – it is minor errors like these that cause major discomfort within the platform for users. Student Connected will once again take all of these issues into consideration & will build upon them to help create a system that will support Blackboard and hopefully increase the usability of both platforms.  Blackboard tends to be too rigid, corporate and uninteresting, it doesn’t give any incentive to sit down and do work or be creative. These are the issues faced daily on a desktop system which allows more control and screen space, blackboard’s app amplifies these problems and is usually disregarded by students soon after installing.

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I have found that there are too many problems that I have studied within the survey monkey report & what I’ve personally noticed – all future improvements will be created for the Student Connected app and then justified in the R&D & presentation file.

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Two clear examples showcasing the multiple tabs issue which was mentioned in the SurveyMonkey responses.