Today was my last day shadowing at SAS, so I met with Bryce who works in accessibility as a tester for text to speech. He’s legally blind, and I’m deaf, so we sort of talked about how we sort of have to do things differently, and how that may relate to testing. The point is to make things as accessible to many users as possible. If you have low/no vision, you can turn graphs and charts into sound by using a higher pitch for higher/bigger data points, and lower pitches for lower data points. If you play it all at once you can get a quick overview of how the data trends based on how it sounds. It was pretty eye opening and really cool.
The second half of the day, we spent back in A with the rest of the group from CA and HR. We presented our videos that we made (no link here, but have my gif). Overall I really enjoyed my time at SAS, and I look forward to summer.
a gif I made! (you have to click on it for it to start)
Today I spent a lot of time around more of the frontend and CSS side of things, and getting pretty much inundated [enter waterfall gif] with new information (despite it being hard to keep up, I enjoyed it). I met Trevor, who does a lot of js/html/css which I’m interested in (yay frontend). I also met Beth and Cindy, who do a lot of the sort of more nitpicky side of things- theming, colors, spacing, alignment- which gives the application its overall sort of polished look.
Tomorrow is my last day, and honestly I’m a little sad to be leaving (but only for a short while!) even though shadowing people is really exhausting.
I’m sorry I keep posting photos of dessert but enjoy this one
Today, I met a lot more people from the UX and developer side of things, wheras my first three days were spent with the visual design team and Mark. I was with Leah for the first half of the day, where we spent an hour or so going over Honeycomb, which is a sort of “database” for components. Apparently I’ll be redesigning the UI for this over the summer, or at least, starting work on it now. I spent a lot of time in scrums/meetings, where everyone sort of introduced themselves and the product that they’re working on.
Something interesting about SAS is that they separate the overall product design into three groups- visual designers, UI/UX, and dev- which I think is a little bit different since generally those are usually one job. But because SAS is such a large company and has so many different projects and products, it’s sort of unfeasible.
Tomorrow I get to work on a bunch of cool stuff -javascript, color schemes and themes, and some super secret stuff :^). I’m excited.
I further my green tea obsession by taking it one step up- it’s now unsweetened. It has lemonade in it. It’s overpriced. I’m paying 3$ for slightly flavored/colored water.
Today we were in building C for most of the day working on a marketing campaign and also a video for GatherIQ with Alyssa, Erin, and Elena. We spent most of the day working on a script and also recorded some clips for the video we’re making- video presentations got moved to Thursday (stay tuned, #everyDropMatters #hashtags ###hashtags 💦🌎⛲💧🌊)
>>>why is there no bucket emoji
I am excited for tomorrow, because I will be back in R amongst the throngs of the software and UI gods. Just kidding, I mean my mentor Leah, who I will probably be shadowing and eating lunch with for the rest of my time at SAS. My agenda is packed full of people, html, UI, and unexpected surprises, so I’m super excited.
“I went to SAS for 8 days and all I got (along with a really great experience in software/ux) was this cool GIQ shirt”
While Mark is at the beach and the other teams get ready for us to transition on to new groups, we worked on something called GatherIQ (which I’ll be calling GIQ from now on), which is part of SAS’s Curriculum Pathways program. We all (10 of us) spent the entire day in R in the usability lab with some of the people involved with GIQ. We split up into groups for the first part of the day and did an informal usability test- we went through a bunch of “tasks”, such as clicking on videos and parts of the site that they wanted us to test. Afterwards, we gave feedback on the site and what we thought of it.
After lunch, they split us into different groups. Instead of making a tile for the GIQ app (makes noises of sadness) because that requires downloading a lot of stuff that we would then have to learn how to use, etc etc, we are instead, making a cool video (makes noises of interest) and some marketing thingy (makes noises of disinterest), so stay tuned for that.
Next week on Tuesday I start work on more of the frontend side of things: I get to write code!
Green tea obsession aside, today Mark and I spent the morning playing with Sketch and Photoshop Illustrator (despite what the icon says, it is decidedly *not* AI). We then spent the rest of the day in the design labs making wireframes, being in meetings, and working on screens. Tomorrow we take the entire SAS crew to meet Paul (yay for usability lab!!!!!!!) and build part of an app for SAS’s GatherIQ thing. I believe we’re going to be making a tile to add to the app? Anyway, it should be fun!
a quote on the wall leading to the labs; “Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.” -Dieter Rams
I hear John has an obsession with Go now (Pendo’s endless candy bowl rain aside, SAS has better food). I think (I hope) I get to write code next week (I am a proud frontend weeb, backenders beware), so we’ll see whether it’s different or something. I am definitely looking forward to that and being a test subject for GatherIQ tomorrow.
SAS has some pretty funky art and things hanging on the walls like the yoda I found in the cafeteria. Paintings and sculptures counted: somewhere around 35. People I’ve met: more than I can count on my fingers and toes in base ten (which means 20 total). I think I might have to start counting in hex (512 total) on my fingers, but my toes aren’t very flexible so I can’t count on my toes. (Will I have to meet more than 500 people? I hope not.)
Today I spent most of the day in design meetings and also learned more about Sketch. I think it’s interesting that a lot of people are interested in astronomy, or sort of knew what it was (case in point: my astronomy tshirt) which I thought was really cool.
to the deans/dr mac; i’m wearing a skirt, it’s my only skirt, please don’t come after me :'(((
I showed Mark some of my designs and UI that I have built previously (Lodash, personal sites, etc). I’m surprised that he didn’t know about this color scheme generator, which is super easy to use and looks pretty too! I met Paul, the guy who runs the usability lab. We talked about how developers test apps and get feedback from users- the usability lab helps developers pinpoint where someone might get stuck, and also features to add/or remove to an app or program. (brownie points to Paul for having owned a telescope 🔭).
You’d honestly think that since “Anna really likes writing code, Anna really likes doing UX-UI (and also design, in relation to all of those things)”, and that these two things would naturally and easily mesh together. And yet: I have not seen or written a single line of code. Big shocker, I know. Even so, I have really enjoyed learning how to use Sketch and making wireframes, as well as drawing on coffee cups during long, boring meetings. (Hopefully I do see lines of code in the next few days/week or so.)
Lunch was yummy and pretty much spectacular- if this trend continues on, I’m going to be too spoiled for CA lunch and my mom’s cooking. I bought a (yet another) cup of green tea (this has been my fourth cup this week) from the downstairs Starbucks, so I will need an intervention from the tea/coffee/drink gods at some point (hopefully soon, before I turn into green tea myself). 🍵
I received this pack of m&ms from SAS during orientation today
We start our day at 10 in a sort of “orientation”, where our intern manager, Christie gave us a sort of overview on what SAS is about, the company culture, and what SAS is involved in. Ranging from topics from elephants, to healthcare, to humanitarian crises, and to local police department projects, SAS seems to span multiple industries. The food in the cafeteria is nothing short of amazing, though I always get the same thing every time I visit- the sushi. It’s so good… 🍣
After lunch and watching some videos, we went to our various buildings; I’m in R for the entire WEP. (Did you know that it has a Starbucks on the bottom floor?) This week I am shadowing Mark Malek, who graduated from NC State with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design. We spent a little bit of time touring the design spaces and meeting his coworkers whom I’ll probably also be working with this summer. The rest of the day was geared towards learning Sketch, which is a wireframe tool used for designing UI. I personally think it has a very different feel from Figma (another competitor with Sketch), but Sketch is only on MacOS anyway. I’m sort of surprised that most of the keybinds and macros on Figma actually translate over to Sketch, and so do the ones from Photoshop Illustrator. I am excited to see what tomorrow will bring, and I hope to learn more new things.
