Week 6: Experiences in the Poster & Pitch

Concept, project and design process  

Documentation

Writing up part A document was fairly similar to project documentation I have written for projects at work.  While it seems like a lot of writing and a lot of work, it is an important skill with workplace application.  It is also important because it clarifies a lot of the detail of our project and outlines our plan for how we will turn our concept into an application.

Design thinking

Design thinking last semester taught us a lot of different processes and design techniques.  They were all clearly prescribed and written into our assessment criteria.  The criteria for this project doesn't have the same level of detail and I found myself thinking back to those pieces of assessment as a guideline.  I imagine my design thinking toolbox will get easier to remember the more I use it.

The brief

Student briefs are generally comprised of two elements, the 'client' needs and the assessment needs. One of the problems we have already come across (as detailed in a previous post) is which APIs we will need to use to complete the project.  The 'client' needs is to highlight an area of Trove, the assessment needs is to learn how to use API calls (in particular the Trove API).  It was good to find out that there was a little room to move so that the 'client' need still came first.

Feedback

I did a quick write-up of the feedback we received from our Part A presentation on our team blog. We also went over the feedback in more detail in our Part A document.  The piece of feedback that stood out most to me was around help.  Our intention for our concept was never to provide training but for it to be a tool students could use to practice html skills and in the process learn about web standards and practice validation.  It hadn't occurred to me to provide help information or how our users would go about getting help if they were stuck.  There were many suggestions from class including a discussion board, chat or links.

I recently did the AngularJS track in Codeacademy and really liked the way they did help.  One problem with chat (and other types of help) is that it requires staffing or moderation.  The way codeacademy approach is to leverage existing methods of getting code help and incorporating it in context (i.e. where the student needs it). Here are some screen shots.

 

Even though they use other services to provide the help, they still guide the user there with questions. This is a much better approach than just providing links or a discussion board.  While we can put together information on tags and tag depreciation to get users started, if they are looking for more in-depth help, Stack Overflow would be the best source for this.  The other benefit of this is familiarising users with standard help channels for code that they can use in future for other coding problems.

Other teams

Seeing other teams progress was good inspiration.  It was interesting to see how they had divided the team responsibilities and how technical their projects will be.  I know there will be quite a lot of learning ahead of me to be able to complete the project but I found it encouraging listening to other teams proposals and how they are approaching the different components.  The other concepts were also interesting to see, especially the shipwreck one (Atlantis).  Early Australian shipwrecks was the individual concept I presented and I'm really interested to see how another team will pursue and change the idea. Seeing it progress to a more complete interface from the wireframes I presented was great.

My process

Completing the part A presentation and documentation has reiterated to me the importance of planning in design thinking techniques to a project.  It would be easy to plan a project considering only the end product and the technical needs (i.e. how am I going to make this).  But it is important to plan in time for research, testing and feedback.  I know that there are a lot of design resources (like the d.school) but I also think it might be good for me to keep a record of the different techniques I've used to add to as I progress.