I wanted to come to Unboxed because I was interested in digital services and the process of their design. Unboxed is company that does just that. They are a great close working team that work together collaboratively in order to provide the best service possible.
A bit of coding
At Unboxed I was greeted by the lovely Celia who is a developer. She taught me some of the basics of Ruby on Rails to get myself familiarised and then let me work on some code myself. After that we looked at some of the code on a web application that they created for an NHS trust. It was a great experience actually seeing it in person, learning how everything works and what developers actually do. I even got to change some of the code and make my own alterations to the website. Celia was really helpful and made things clear. It really started to get me interested in coding again.
Unboxed design club
During the week I joined the Unboxed design club meeting. It was a unique experience that really gave everybody a chance to participate and share their own thoughts. They had this really interesting exercise using metaphors to think about the design process.
A day of design
I had the opportunity to work with Tom, one of Unboxed’s designers. Tom is currently working on something called the commonhold project, where he is trying to increase people's use of commonhold ownership. Tom had given me a task to research the right to manage - a right under the commonhold act. From this I found out how it worked and the different challenges people who are in right to manage homes face. Tom then gave the chance to design something to meet one of these challenges, which was great. I summarised what I had done and learnt for the day in a presentation which I delivered to the Unboxed team. It was nerve-racking but they were really kind and gave some positive feedback.
A bit about business development
I had a talk with Jo who was part of the business and marketing team. Her job was to get work and build relationships with other companies for Unboxed. She told about how her role was so unique in comparison to similar positions in other companies. Other companies would often have a particular product or service to sell, whereas Unboxed helps other companies create their own products and services. It was really nice hearing about the uniqueness of Unboxed and Jo's experience.
I wrote a blog post
My first blog post is probably not the best but I had some fun writing it. I'd like to thank the Unboxed team for being so welcoming and Vicky for giving me this opportunity to come here. It was nice to write this and recount my experience over the course of the week. I really enjoyed my time with you.
Thanks Unboxed!