Photo by Molly McLeod

There were a handful of really interested challenges to address, but I ended up going with a challenge I have a personal connection to: local banking. I switched over from a big bank to a local co-op on the National Bank Transfer Day, and haven’t looked back since. Led by Pioneer Valley Local First founder Daniel Finn, the Benefits of Banking Locally challenge aimed to increase the number of people in the Pioneer Valley who bank locally.

My group was a small, but we had a great mix of people which really helped us focus on specific portions of our challenge. We started Saturday together, trying to identify key problems. What issues do local banks face when trying to gain new members? Why don’t more people bank locally? Daniel’s knowledge as a subject matter expert was exceptional, giving us key insights into the problems. Once we teased out some of these problems, we moved on to users: who already uses a local bank? Who doesn’t, and why don’t they? What triggers could motivate these users to make the switch from big bank to local bank?

Photo taken by Molly McLeod

Once we figured out our problem and our users, we split off into an individual sketching session, with each of us drawing various solutions we saw to increase the amount of people switching over to banking locally.

Photo by Molly McLeod

After sketching, we regrouped to talk about all of our potential solutions, mixing and matching until we came up with a game plan: a story-based website that led you through the personal and community benefits to banking locally, culminating in a call-to-action prompting you to switch to a local bank.

Xin Xin and I worked together on the design of the website, while Julia Mattes and Sam Dana tackled the research and content creation (making Xin and my job much easier!). Daniel updated the current PV Local First website to include the new data about local banking he, Julia and Sam found. Kelly Dwan worked on developing the new story-based site, while Ron Martinez and Matt created an interactive map allowing people to find local banks near them in the Pioneer Valley.

Photo by Steven Brewer

Sunday was a whirlwind of working — Xin and I finished up the design, and Kelly jumped over from setting up the back-end to working on the front-end for the site. Julia and Sam started entering content and local bank information to feed into the map, which Ron continued work on while Matt floated between sections to help everyone out.

By the end of the day, we weren’t quite finished, but had enough to show off during our presentation:

Photo by Molly McLeod

Kelly and Ron are working together after the hackathon to finish up our solution. The website portion is almost complete, and you can check it out here.

All of the presentations went really well. It was exciting to see what the other groups had worked on over the weekend! Everyone had something really cool to show. Overall, the weekend seemed to be a total success.

Thanks to the organizers for putting on what was the best organized hackathon I’ve attended (with hands-down, the. best. food), and to the sponsors for helping the event happen! Can’t wait to attend again next year.

Thanks to everyone who came by last night, special thanks to Steph Yiu from Automattic for getting a bunch of tshirts for us, and extra special thanks to Meadhall in Kendall Square, Cambridge for being such a fantastic venue! Finally, thank you, WordPress, for being a source of employment for so many, a cause to rally for, and a treasure to the world.

We’ve seen a pretty big jump in blogging and writing platforms in the past year: just look at Medium and Editorially. I think Ghost is a little more exciting though, because it’s not a service — it’s web software. It’s an open source blogging platform that, from the sounds of it, will work like WordPress — you’ll be able to download and install it anywhere.

I’m pretty stoked about Ghost, not just for what it is, but for what it means. I love WordPress, I love that it’s evolving, and I’m excited to see where it goes in the future. But it hasn’t had a big competitor in a while, especially on the blogging front. A dose of really strong competition could push WordPress to become something greater.

Ghost is being funded via Kickstarter, and is poised to meet its goal within 24 hours. Want to help it out?

The five of us came from very different backgrounds. I worked as a user interface designer and occasional front-end developer as a freelancer and consultant, within agencies, and most recently within a startup. Xin was an animation major before working as lead designer at a startup. Sean was also an animation major, but went into freelancing. Mat worked as a print designer before picking up web design and development, and Dave, a Starter League graduate, worked with startups in Chicago as a UX designer and developer. We all had varying degrees of prior industry experience and expertise, which made us ideal candidates for Fresh Tilled Soil’s apprenticeship program.

Now that I’ve had a brief vacation and had time to gather my thoughts, I wanted to give an overview of the program and my experiences with it.

Bootcamp

I wrote extensively about Bootcamp on the Fresh Tilled Soil blog, but to recap, we started the apprenticeship out with some pre-work (reading Learning JavaScript by FTS developer Tim Wright and completing assignments based on the book) which we went over in our first couple of days.

The rest of Bootcamp was a mix of reading (Steal Like an Artist, Thinking With Type and About Face 3), presentations given by the FTS team, and a UX strategy and discovery challenge. Presentations were focused on pretty much every major segment of design and front-end development essentials, all from the lens of user experience. Our challenge focused on the strategy and discovery phase of a web app design project, culminating in a group client presentation and individual clickable wireframes.

Bootcamp was kind of exhausting, but was a successful way to begin our apprenticeships and get all of us starting on a similar level of theoretical UX knowledge.

Mentorship

At the end of Bootcamp, each apprentice was chosen by a mentor who could relate to our individual goals and skills. I was chosen by Steve Hickey, a total design & front-end dev badass with a love of good type. (Obligatory dribbble and github links.)

Our mentors were tasked with overseeing our work over the course of our apprenticeship. They provided individual (and occasionally group) feedback on challenge and client work. We checked in with them at least once or twice every week.

Individual mentorship is, by far, the best feature of AUX. Mat wrote a bit about it on the Fresh Tilled Soil blog. I have never before had an opportunity for the type of in-depth, personal mentorship that I received as an apprentice at Fresh Tilled Soil. Steve was able to see exactly where I was falling short in my work and guide me towards better ways of thinking about design problems and potential solutions. He got me to think about each design decision I made and be able to back it up  with solid reasoning (no bullshit allowed). It was, honestly, exactly what I needed to improve as a designer.

Challenges

We engaged in several challenges throughout the three months to boost our individual design and development skills. We converted a psd into an accessible form, identified problems with the modern TV experience and came up with solutions to those problems, designed the interface for a mobile MBTA app, and created something we could share with the design community (still a WIP). I was also given some sub-challenges by my mentor, Steve, to help improve specific skills.

Each challenge culminated in a presentation to the AUX team (apprentices, program leader and mentors), followed by an open critique. They were a chance for us to show of our skills and gain insightful feedback which helped us see where we fell short.

Additionally, we wrote some blog entries for the FTS website (mine were the aforementioned Learning by Doing and Giving Back)

Client Work

No good apprenticeship would be complete without, of course, client work. Each apprentice was involved in some client projects (sometimes alone, sometimes alongside our mentors). We also as a group had total control over one major project.

Our group project was a major point of learning. We did everything from the initial strategy and discovery phase, up to completion of wireframes for a redesigned mobile application and responsive marketing website with an account dashboard component. Mat acted as project manager, and our team collaborated, jumping in where appropriate and stepping back when not during each of our two-week sprints.

Sean wrote a bit about our first sprint, a two week deep dive into the existing product and assets, where we looked to identify the problem we would be solving in the next several sprints. We spent most of that sprint going in wrong directions. Finally, we just needed to step back, break the product down into its smallest bits, and build back up.

Our proposed solution kept only the essentials of the product, stripping away unnecessary layers and features. When it came down to it, the app was brilliant at one thing. It didn’t need the rest. It needed to focus on making that one task even easier, and our proposed solution (and a redesigned marketing site) would need to reflect that.

The weeks that followed were made of steady work and constant iteration. We would iterate on a deliverable a dozen or more times before it even made it to the client. We were all sad to see our parts in the project wrap up at the end of our apprenticeship, when we handed off all of our work to the FTS team to finalize. That one project taught me more about the user experience design process than any book ever has, and I am grateful we had the opportunity to work closely with such a great product and team.

Life After AUX

AUX was an amazing, enlightening, and humbling experience. It pushed me past my limits, challenging me in a way I’ve never experiences. It was exhausting. Overall, I can say with confidence that it was one of the best experiences of my life, and most definitely my best career decision to date.

Now that AUX is done, what am I doing with my life?

I’ve spent the past two weeks sleeping in, relaxing, and catching up on some projects I’m involved in. I’ve been working with several designers and developers on MP6, a plugin which updates the WordPress admin interface design. Most of my contributions so far have been to dashicons, the new icon font we’re using within the admin. I’ve also been working on post format icons.

I’m currently pursuing some job leads, but am still open to chat. If you’re interested in hiring me, I’d love to talk — please send me a message via my contact form.

Additionally, I mentioned I’d post up some resources on web fonts:

Where to find web fonts:

• Google Web Fonts
• Typekit
• The League of Moveable Type
• MyFonts Webfonts
• Fontshop
• Fonts.com Web Fonts
• Font Squirrel
• Fontspring
• Lost Type Coop

Some Good Articles & Books

• http://webtypography.net/
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fonts-at-the-crossing/
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluidgrids/
• http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/choosing-the-right-font-a-practical-guide-to-typography-on-the-web/
• http://www.fontspring.com/blog/the-new-bulletproof-font-face-syntax
• http://www.abookapart.com/products/on-web-typography
• http://www.webtypography.net/
• http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881791326

There’s many questions around why there aren’t more females speaking in this industry. I can tell you why,they are scared. Everytime I jump on stage, I get comments, either about the way I look, or the fact that I’m the female, the token, the one they have to sit through in order for the males to come back on again. One conference, I even had a guy tweet something derogatory about me not 30 seconds into my talk, only for me to bring up the point he had berated me for not bringing up, not a minute later – which caused him to have to apologise to my face after public backlash. I’ve had one guy come up to me in a bar and say (after explaining he didn’t like my talk)… “no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys”. Sarah Parmenter

I want to talk a little bit about my experiences, specifically in the WordPress community. To start, though, here’s a bit about me. I’ve been taught from a young age that women are awesome. Though my mother might not have been the best parent as I was growing up, she is and always has been an incredibly strong woman who taught me, quite frankly, not to take shit from anyone. It’s something I internalized early. I spent thirteen long years as an active girl scout, being encouraged that whole time to be a strong leader and activist. This encouragement extended into my college years at Smith. Smithies are known for raising a raucous, and boy, do we like to give “the man” hell. Needless to say, I’ve never really been intimidated by “male spaces”.

This leads me to WordPress. One of the things that immediately attracted me to WordPress was the number of visible women. I went to my first WordCamp (NY ’10) along with some coworkers. At that point I had probably spent about a year working on and off with WordPress, and had enjoyed it, but I wasn’t really in love with it like I am now. WordCamp NYC changed that. Part of it was the excitement, camaraderie and learning that comes along with any tech conference, but a bit part of it was who specifically was there. I was a little in awe of Jen Mylo, Automattic employee and the UX/UI lead for WordPress for several years. I still remember Sara Cannon’s session, Beyond the System Font. Women were involved with organizing the conference, women were volunteering, and women were speaking. It was my kind of place.

I think one of the unusual(ly awesome) things about the WordPress community, in contrast to the overall tech community, is just how easy it is to find amazingly talented women to look up to. They’re everywhere: From designers like Jen Mylo, Sara Cannon and Chelsea Otakan, to Helen Hou-Sandi, rockstar core contributor, developer, and current UI team lead, to Siobhan McKeown, an amazing web writer now an editor at Smashing Magazine, to Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author, really dynamic and personable speaker, and now partner at WebDevStudios. I could go on listing people. The number of women working with, writing about, and speaking on WordPress is huge. WordPress really helped my find a place in the overall tech community. It really inspired me to start speaking, which is something I want to continue to do as I grow as a designer and a community member.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying the community is a bubble immune to discrimination, harassment, or all the other nasty things that plague the tech industry. I’m sure we have a lot of things we’re doing wrong. But my experiences within the WordPress community have helped positively shape me as a designer and as a woman, and for that I am thankful.

Would you like a pocket-size device that reminded you of each appointment and daily event? I would. I am waiting for the day when portable computers become small enough that I can keep one with me at all times. I will definitely put all my burdens upon it. It has to be small. It has to be convenient to use. And it has to be relatively powerful, at least by today’s standards. It has to have a full, standard typewriter keyboard and a reasonably large display. It needs good graphics, because that makes a tremendous difference in usability, and a lot of memory—a huge amount, actually. And it should be easy to hook up to the telephone  I need to connect it to my home and laboratory computers. Of course, it should be relatively inexpensive.

- Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things