Earlier this year, we were asked by our friends at Southampton Solent University to get involved with a project. It was a project for their final year Web Design and Development students. Our task was to provide a live brief which the students could work on. The goal being to give them real industry experience of what it’s like to work on actual projects.
Preparing the Brief
We went through our portfolio of existing clients and selected a web project which we felt would be both interesting and challenging, with lots of opportunity for creativity! The students were then allocated 84 hours to work on the project. This ran from January to March. As part of this, the students had to research and undertake planning (such as wireframing) as well as designing different elements for the project such as logos.
At the end of the project, we were sent all of the finished pieces. We then scored their work against a number of different criteria. This included research, wireframing, user journeys, design and build. We were incredibly impressed with the quality of the work that was provided to us. Many students had gone above and beyond the brief with lots of added extras which contributed towards the end result.
Awarding the Winner
On the 23rd May we were back to Solent Uni for the Computing Programme’s Poster Day & Prizegiving. We were armed with a voucher and much praise for the student we felt had produced the best overall response to our brief.
This went to Martin Kiss who scored 10/10 on our scoring matrix. The project demonstrated brilliant research – a very critical stage – which covered multiple areas and was then assessed to inform the outcome. It was great to see use of additional elements such as iconography to boost recognition and user experience. We were very impressed with how each element had been considered with not only how it needed to function, but also how it could be amplified by use of design.
We’d like to wish all the students finishing at Solent Uni this year the best of luck for the future! We’ve really enjoyed being part of this project. We never stop being amazed at the great work all the students from local universities are producing!