Hi there! I'm Sofia, I was born on May 31st, 1992 and I am striving to become a good UX/UI Designer.
My story begins at the end of 2017.
I graduated from the University of Siena in December in Strategies and Techniques for Communication - Experience Design Curriculum, and I immediately started looking for a job as a UX/UI Designer.
I was full of hope and enthusiasm.
I prepared a resume with a neat graphic look (but no experience as a designer to be included) and started looking for companies all over Italy that wanted to hire a UX Designer.
I have attended dozens of job interviews all over Italy.
Every time, it was the same old story: an exhausting train journey, endless waiting, an informal interview and the classic final phrase We'll let you know. But no one ever let me know.
After a couple of months, I finally realised where I was going wrong: I was applying for roles for which I was not yet ready. I didn't have any UX work experience. Sure, I had been involved in some very interesting projects at university, but that wasn't enough.
If I really wanted to enter the world of UX, I had to start from the bottom and look for an apprenticeship.
One evening, on the bus ride back from a job interview gone wrong, I found Riccardo Ghignoni's profile on LinkedIn. I read that he worked as a freelance UX Designer at Officina 31, in Arezzo. Without thinking too much about it, I wrote him a message to explain my situation.
Riccardo made himself available for a video call. We talked about my expectations and started a collaboration. I just wanted to learn, I didn't ask anything else.
This collaboration, born almost as a game, proved to be providential.
What has this story taught me? Humility is the only possible attitude when you want to achieve a goal.
In Aruba I am focusing on User Research. I am actually responsible for collecting and analysing user feedback through the GetFeedback platform. The feedback given by users help me and the UX team to continuously improve our interfaces.
I also deal with the analysis of user flows and the creation of prototypes to improve the Cloud platform and other Aruba services.
This was my first real experience in the field as a UX Designer. In this web agency I had the opportunity to deal with many different projects and many different clients. I learnt a lot about customer relationship management and I focused mainly on Service Design.
It was an exciting growth experience that taught me much more than I had hoped for.
Officina 31 is a real happy oasis.
I was welcomed into the studio after graduating and here I was able to experiment freely with whatever I wanted. I have worked on UX Design projects, but I have also been able to observe Video making, Photography, Motion Graphics and Web Marketing projects.
I am very grateful to the guys at Officina 31, because they really opened my eyes to the world of the World Wide Web.
During the academic year 2016/2017, I carried out a 300-hour curricular internship at the Interaction Design laboratory of the University of Siena. I collaborated in the experimental cognitive psychology sessions of the European project AXIOM.
I dealt with the organisational and management aspects of the experimental sessions and the collection of data for the organisation of an archive of audio tracks and photographic material to be implemented in facial recognition software.
Communication Strategies and Techniques - Experience Design curriculum
Final mark: 110 with honours
Humanistic studies - History of Art curriculum
Final mark: 110
Taylor & Francis Group - Ergonomics
Co-authors: Oronzo Parlangeli, Niccolò Targi
