UNLAX Summary

Hong Kong is a very fast-paced and competitive society, and this adds much weight to the value of quality study. For students, there is a lot of stress in keeping up with the demanding education standards and they may not even have access to the right environment for studying especially with the recent pandemic.

UNLAX seeks to fulfill the social utility in dealing with these problems, as the project provides up-to-date information and necessary resources for university students looking for a quality and affordable place for relaxation and study.

Our digital artefact features an Instagram page and a blog site, with both of the platforms fulfilling two key elements in the project. Instagram acts as UNLAX’s main means of outreach towards the intended target audience, university students. The platform was also used as a means of conducting user engagement, as well as a effective way for us to advertise in other study-related Instagrams.

Instagram carousels with animated pictures were included as a means of promoting the reviewed study area, and these posts also acted as the gateway to the blog. The blog was meant for providing an in-depth review of the study review, and included promotional videos of its respective study space.

Development Process

In the beginning, we started off as clueless students randomly matched as a group, with none of us having any familiarity with the other.

The first thing I did was make a Discord server for the group, which was vital in communicating online as well as sharing various ideas and co-ordination. It was also infrequent that we could manage an offline meetings, thus most of our decisions were made on the messaging app. Each person was promptly delegated into a role based on our skillsets, and my duties became mainly the production side of things as well as communicating with study space companies for their kind permissions.

Our first discussion was also figuring what to do for our digital artefact, and the idea of doing something like ‘game reviews’ became our first lead after discovering a majority of the team composed of avid gamers that shared a common interest. It could be fun, we all thought.

But after a while of consideration, my second thoughts had left me stressed over its lack of virtue as a social utility. It may even end up too time-consuming, and our ideas were lacking any feasible plans to make the project pull through.

The critical decision had to be made as it decided the foundation and course our digital artefact would ultimately be heading with. When I learned of each person’s talents, I figured something that made use of Gio’s photography skills combined with my technical knowledge would have been best.

In our discussion, we figured out a possible social utility with greater relevance. I felt that our newfound purpose aimed towards helping local students find comfortable study spaces carried more weight, and it could synergize the skillsets of the team in producing such a digital artefact.

I then provided a list of names, where the team fancied UNLAX as it was not only the portmanteau of University and Relax. Another fun fact, ‘Unlax’ is a real slang that is actually synonymous with ‘relax’ so it does fit well with our digital artefact’s purpose.

UNLAX had initially planned for using a variety of platforms for the digital artefact, namely Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Wix for the blog. But maintaining all of these would’ve been extra effort with little potential gain, so we limited our digital artefacts to the blog and Instagram, as the platform has a strong penetration rate with our target audience.

The finalized team organization ended up in respect to the design principles of F.I.S.T, where we eventually managed to maintain a record of weekly updates which in a fast manner. With our focus on locating cost-effective study spaces, the project’s costs were inexpensive. We only required to maintain two social media platforms, namely Instagram and the blog, which adheres to the simple and tiny aspects of the F.I.S.T principles.

With gaining the approval and recognition of the project’s value by our tutor, our project finally began. Though we still got off on a rough start. As the main video editor, I found myself at the brunt of merciless (yet appreciated) criticism on the first review video I made. I was confused and did not have a concrete idea of what to do, resulting in quite a lot of jarring flaws that were kindly pointed out.

This was very much welcomed especially early on, as it teaches the importance of FEFO (Fail Early Fail Often) in iterating to a successful product.

The feedback would have led to several iterations as I kept the advice to heart, eventually perfecting a format where the video was neither too long nor short, and immediately produced the most important tidbits of information for the viewer where the pricing and various key points are introduced in a timely manner within the video.

Just by comparing the first three video reviews, you can see the obvious changes between them. The first one was too long at 1 minute, the second was too short at only 15 seconds, but the third was the ideal duration at the sweet middle point of 30 seconds. Unlike the first iteration, the succeeding videos also kept the UNLAX logo consistently visible throughout the video.

Our main method of user engagement was through Instagram, with the social department of the team responding regularly to comments. With nearing a hundred followers, it was rather inspiring and encouraged us to continue posting updates weekly.

Overall, I believe the project has turned out quite well and I have learned a lot from this. I have fulfilled my duties as a group member and feel as if I’ve earned experience akin to that of working with a company marketing themselves. Furthermore, seeing the noticeable improvement in my video editing skills in the course of just a few weeks is actually quite inspiring, so I am thankful for the journey so far.