DECO1800: Design Computing Studio 1

This week's blog task was to reflect on the course as a whole and the portfolio process for the final assessment piece this semester. Since I have already reflected about my journey through the course and what I achieved in regard to my learning goals in my  semester reflection  blog post, I will just be focusing on the portfolio process today. The portfolio process ended up being extremely rushed due to poor time management on my part. I seriously underestimated the amount of work I had to do and forced myself into a corner in completing this assignment. In my last blog post  talking about the work I had done toward the portfolio so far, I said that I had compiled all the necessary content for the assignment in an effort to alleviate the work load and take the pressure off. Re-reading the assignment criteria made me realise I had missed a lot of key points and I felt as if though many of the sections I had written were not suitable for the criteria. Unfortunately in th...

This week marks the start of SWOTVAC and a busy time in my university life, with many exams and deadlines rapidly approaching. Keeping this in mind I have tried my best to stay on top of the portfolio assessment and keep to the deadlines I laid out for myself in my  portfolio design process  blog post from week 11. Content wise I have achieved what I set out to do - I have written or compiled the necessary texts for each section of the site from my blog entries over the semester and have a folder with relevant images and screenshots to support this. I also decided to limit my personal section of the site to reflect just one hobby that displays some of my creativity and skills in the form of my video editing. I took the time to compile the videos on YouTube and investigated some CSS design layouts to display an array of media. Included below is a graphic prototype of a makeshift logo I plan on using to add more style to the website: Overall, I think that I am making s...

With the semester drawing to a close, and the only piece of assessment left for DECO1800 being the personal portfolio, I thought it would be useful to take a look back on the semester and reflect on the assessment items and classes to see what I have learned and what skills I improved. By looking back to my  first blog entry  for the semester, regarding my course aims and expectations I can see that I was able to fulfil many of the tasks I had initially laid out for myself.  At the start of the course I believed I would be able to improve my web design skills by learning new things and I definitely think I achieved this. The workshops proved instrumental to this - working through examples to learn about AJAX calls and PHP global elements were just two examples that I specifically remember. Not only the workshops, the lectures helped me better myself in this area - Matt shared a great deal of knowledge on topics like decomposition and modularity. Whilst I may have not go...

Yesterday, the team and I engaged in our last piece of assessment together: the presentation of our web application 'On this day' in the form of a trade-show. Reflecting on the pitch I think the team did a really good job of mentioning all the key points of the web application that are specifically relevant to a trade show audience; we tried to keep away from the technical side and focused on the actual 'selling' of our site. We distributed brochures that summarised what we were talking about which were a huge help as the audience could follow along or read at their own pace throughout the presentation. I think as a team we could have improved upon the uniformity of our separate presentations. We didn't have a chance to go over the specifics of what we would discuss hence when we split up and talked to individual audience members separately I think each of us emphasised different points. This isn't necessarily something we did wrong as a group, however in a comp...

This week the team used our time to complete all the remaining components of Project Part C. Considering all the major functionalities of our website are up and running, I spent the majority of my time this week working on the report and the trade-show components of the assessment. As the semester progressed and our web application continued through its development phase, I felt as if I was not able to contribute to the site as much as I should have been, so I decided to step up and take leadership in completing the report section of Part C. Considering this, I allocated my time this week as follows: Sunday-Thursday: finishing my report sections Friday-Saturday: compiling and formatting the report Sunday-Monday: editing the report and running it by the group My report sections were focused on the first criteria point regarding the final product. I tried to keep the general scope and functionality sections as visual as I could by using dot points and various media (images, gr...

Due to the technical limitations of the Twitter API not allowing us to get tweets from every users from a single day, it was decided to use the alternative method of getting the tweets of a single user, sorting these by date, and repeating this process for several other users (specifically users tweeting about things that happened on a specific date) to compile a set of tweets that still relate to our web application's purpose. The single-user tweets method relies on the utilisation of a TwitterOAuth library and the example I followed along used a user named a library by user 'Abraham' (accessed and downloaded from GitHub ). I first retrieved my Twitter API key and secret from the developers page which were used to identify the specific application. These were defined as variables in index.php: Next, connection was established using these newly created variables using the Abraham Twitter library. Following this a call is made to get the tweets from a specified user a...

This week's workshop session was all about planning and preparing to develop our portfolio. A summary of the process I completed and notes I took during the session can be seen below: PHASE 1: Browsing portfolio's for inspiration Below I have included a list of design elements that I liked and could potentially use in my portfolio: Image navigation links: on hover the name of the link shows up and the image darkens -  Sagmeister & Walsh 's portfolio Single page scroll portfolio with links to jump down -  Melanie Daveid 's portfolio Header only shows up once scrolling down the page begins -  Studio Schurk 's site Simple animations on hover -  Mark Thomas 's portfolio Header that automatically changes as the page scrolls -  Jesse Willmon 's portfolio PHASE 2: Initial brainstorming The following have been constructed with a single page scroll type portfolio in mind. Site map Potential design layout Colour scheme I really like how b...

In this week's contact I took on the role of delegating the remaining tasks of Part C to the team to make sure everything gets done on time. Below an image of the planning document can be seen for reference. The document is formatted to show the key questions needing to be answered in the final report (and website/tradeshow) followed by a summarised description of how we can answer them. Looking back at the contact, I think I made suitable choices in delegating the tasks to each team member. It's often hard to keep everyone happy and get them doing a part of the project that they want, however after spending a semester with my team I feel like I gave everyone a task suits their skills and that they would enjoy. For example Ben was allocated the job of reading through the code and adding comments as I have learnt that he enjoys making and polishing programs while Qi is in charge of the tradeshow as he is good at compiling work into a presentation. With this work allocation ...

The past week has been mid-semester break, and this has served as an effective time to keep working through the remaining assessment items for DECO1800 this semester. Over the break I worked specifically on two assessment items - Part C and my portfolio and the word completed has been documented below: Work done in regards to Part C: Over the break I was specifically focused on figuring out suitable alternatives to the originally planned Twitter column (changing from a feed of daily tweets due to technical limitations). The list of alternatives I explored are as follows: Using the Twitter REST API to get tweets from a singular account - able to get data and display data Using a news website API instead - unable to get data Using the Wikipedia API instead - able to get data unable to use data Exploring these options and failing in the most part really gets my thinking about my technical skills as a web developer. This is my first time using API's and I am honestly struggl...

This week our team presented our work-in-progress website as part of the Part B progress report presentations. Whilst working on the project, we ran into several problems which stunted our progress so we are not as far along as we had initially hoped. These issues were mainly technical, and revolved around the restrictiveness of the Twitter API and lack of formatting from the SLQ databases. To meet our minimum viable product (MVP) we specified earlier in the semester, we still have to finish/fix: The calendar The Twitter column The SLQ data column General formatting As many of these issues only require a small amount of change, we believe as a team that can exceed our MVP and produce a web application with additional functionalities. During Part B presentations, the team asked for feedback on 3 major points. The points and respective criticisms have been detailed below: R egarding the Twitter API – due to Twitter only providing seven days of trend data to users and no a...

With the due date for the portfolio assignment approaching, I thought it would be relevant to consider the actual content that I could put on my website. I have done only a few limited projects at university so far so I feel that it is very important to look at exterior projects that I have completed that could go onto the portfolio to show readers more of myself and to give the portfolio a more wholesome appearance. Career-related work This section will be all about the assignments I have completed that I feel could be shown to a company to advertise myself and my skills: High school projects - mainly assignments from my Graphics subject which highlight my advanced understanding of CAD software. University projects - assignments that show my understanding of design principles in general and for web design. Personal projects This section will be all about personal projects I have completed that whilst might not be directly relevant to a company, give insight about my person...

With the upcoming due date of Part B rapidly approaching, our group has been working on their respective project parts in an effort to deliver our minimum viable product (MVP) for this deadline. As a team we decided that by completing our MVP for this due date would allow us to have a solid foundation for the Part B presentation, as well as allowing ample time to add extra functionalities to the website for the final demonstration. The section of Part B that I was allocated regarded linking the Flickr and Twitter API's to show specific data for the current and each date. Going into this I honestly felt quite worried as this is only my second course in web design and I feel like this is a rather big task to achieve considering my relative intermediate knowledge and skills. I heavily relied on online and workshop sources to get a base of this code up and running and I took the following approach to do so: I first began by attempting to simply get the Flickr and Twitter APIs to ou...

In this week's lecture, Matt introduced our portfolio assessment piece and gave some useful tips to tick all the boxes and maximise the effectiveness and impact of our portfolio. The tips that I found most relevant to the website that I want to construct were: Tip #2 - Show personality This tip was all about sharing a piece of yourself with the audience through the choice of design, colour schemes, text and content. I feel that this is where I can make my portfolio very unique. I think I will use this opportunity to create a personal logo and show off many of my personal projects involving video editing and 3D modelling. An important note however is to select the content being displayed well - after all the portfolio is all about showing off the skills I have and knowledge I can utilise. Tip #6 - Categories work This point was all about using navigational categories to separate different streams of work. For example have a section dedicated to web design, another to...

This contact our team focused on deciding on an acceptable MVP - minimum viable product - for our final product and further delegating tasks to each team member so this could be completed. A written version of the document for this discussion and delegation has been attached below. For our 'On this day' application, it was decided that the MVP would most importantly need the SLQ, Twitter and Flickr API data so that the website could function to its purpose. Other decided necessities include calendar functionality to navigate between days and a stories function to increase the likelihood of user engagement with the site. Reflecting on the session, it was fairly easy to reach this consensus as we were all on the same page going into Part B of the project due to our successful planning and communication in Part A. My tasks for Part B and the website in general revolve around using the Twitter and Flickr API's to receive data from specific dates. I feel quite confident...

The paper prototyping exercise this week in the contact gave some useful feedback for our website. The prototype was constructed mainly aiming to receiving feedback on the navigation systems in place on our website. To best analyse our feedback received, we recorded all of the user trials including their verbal feedback at the end and we also took notes during the trial to note any key functional flaws in our prototype. A video of one of the user trials has been included below. Reflecting on the session I think we definitely got the feedback we were after, in fact the majority of the criticism received regarded site navigation - for example the current date and page dates confused users trying to navigate to the calendar page. This feedback will significantly help us to refine our website to have rigidly specific navigation that is much clearer to all users. Whilst testing other groups' prototypes, I found one common source of frustration was that several of the groups web a...

To prepare for this weeks contact session each team was asked to construct a paper prototype of their web application in an effort to try and find any potential issues that users may have with interaction before the web application is actually developed. The prototype is aimed to find and fix these issues before coding begins to help save effort and time later in the overall process. The below video is a visual demonstration of how the prototype works and the tasks that will be asked of the users. EDIT: The criteria for the prototype to have 7 tasks was added after this video was made. The 3 additional tasks are as follows: Task 5: Read more stories. Task 6: Share a story. Task 7: Follow the "Dogs" trend off the website.

In order to get some initial feedback on our web-application project, the team prepared a short 3 minute pitch to present to the tutors and other teams in the contact session. Reflecting on the pitch, I think we did really well as a team to keep the pacing and timing of pitch going well; in fact the pitch went for exactly 3 minutes which was a fortunate coincidence. I think we managed to convey all the key points to the audience however the audience seemed very distracted whilst we were speaking. While we could blame this on the other teams frantically doing last minute pitch presentations or talking about their concepts I believe adding an extra engagement factor would have been key to drawing the audience into the pitch and maybe even getting some valid feedback. Some ideas I had after the pitch were: Asking some rhetorical questions to tune the audience in and get them thinking   Walking around the room to make eye contact with more individual people and to 'spread' my v...

This week's workshop was based around the learning of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, with the aim of this practice to develop the basic set of skills to construct prototypes and screenshots of proposed website pages. Using these skills I constructed an approximate high fidelity prototype of the home page of our website 'On This Day' for the major project. The major criticism I had of the page after completion was that the colour scheme is not completely visually appealing to the eye. It was aimed to use a neutral colour (grey) as the background to make the 3 coloured data columns stand out (green, blue, purple) however the combination of these two schemes clashes and not appealing. On the other hand I was pleased with the visual balance of the page that the 3 column design provides so this factor will be continued in further phases of design revision.

This week began with the team allocating the tasks of the project Part A between the members to make sure everyone has an even amount of work and are doing something that they are at least partially interested in. Part A was split as follows: To prepare for the workshop I drew up some initial storyboards, an interaction map and a task-flow diagram to discuss with the team which took shape into a final product. The storyboards were based on two personas of a 'regular-user' and a 'single-time-user' and these can be seen below. The interaction map was used to basically map a draft site-plan of how each page interacted with each other and the user. Arrows indicate connecting pages and a brief description can be found adjacent to the sketch. The task flow diagram steps through each user interaction from accessing the website to exiting the website. I found when constructing this initially that our proposed website actually somewhat lacked interaction, therefore...

To narrow down and decide on a web application concept, the team implemented the '6 hats' thinking method. The 6 hats design process was used as it considers more possibilities than traditional thinking methods. A brief description of how our group used the thinking hats respectively can be seen below: Blue hat: The process work of the thinking exercise. White hat: How easy will the SLQ data sets  allow us to create the theorised website. Red hat: Our first impressions of the concept and how easy/difficult it will be to actually create. Yellow hat: The positives we drew from the idea - what makes it easier when developing this idea. Black hat: The negatives we drew from the idea - what makes it harder when developing this website. Green hat: How we can adapt the ideas based on the other hats. Below is the physical notes taken during the thinking hats process:

This week we began to work in our allocated teams to narrow down our ideas and choose one to work with for the duration of the semester. The experience during this process was quite positive; we were able to communicate between each other effectively to avoid conflict and arrive at the same conclusion together. In my personal experience, a team that has multiple 'big personalities' often struggles to gain ground in processes like this as conflict is more likely to occur so I feel very fortunate in this regard to have a team with a collective goal - this helps to maximise our productivity. After deciding on our application idea using the 6 hats thinking method (shown in the latter post) we began delegating tasks to complete Part A of the project. I feel it was a very productive session from this point onward as everyone in the team seemed to be actually interested in the idea rather than being roped along. Personally, I really like the idea of delegating tasks as it allows gro...

During my contact this week, the class grouped some of our initial application ideas by similarities that each group came up with. Some of my favourite groupings can be noted in the pictures below: After this initial grouping was complete, the class voted on popular ideas which were re-grouped by similar traits for example a group of applications relating to a specific data set or applications that use data in a specific way. The two boards that interested me the most were the 'war' grouping board and the 'organised data' grouping board:

Over the past 2 weeks I have been beginning to generate ideas for potential web applications primarily featuring the State Library of Queensland's available data sets: 1. Mining accidents visual timeline Uses the QLD mining accident data to create a visual timeline of the events in the form of a hole being dug. Uses provided dates and incident descriptions. 2. Photo date guesser Uses the photo Queensland data set and asks users to guess the date of a random photo as accurately as they can. Uses provided dates, images and descriptions. 3. Old-time online radio Uses the music Queensland data set in combination with a sheet music-to-sound transformer to play older music online. Uses provided images, names and descriptions. Both individual and group brainstorming methods were utilised to best generate these ideas and each of these methods had their advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion, individually brainstorming ideas worked best to create a lot of starting ...

Pictures of the different contact tables brainstorming suitable ideas for the major project using the SLQ datasets:

With the first week of classes over, I have begun to develop some expectations of what the design computing course will be like, and I have several aims to help me keep track of myself throughout the semester: Based on what I know of this course so far, I expect to be applying the design and web coding skills I have learnt in the previous web design course (DECO1400) in new and practical ways. By doing this I hope to not only further my skills in these areas, but to also produce a suitable web application for the major project that fits the given brief.  I want to be heavily involved with the design planning phase of the project as this is what I believe I'm best at; accounting for numerous different design factors and then visually conveying this to the team. In regards to the major project, I am specifically worried about my ability to use and manipulate JavaScript code, as this was what I struggled with most last semester. I scraped through web design largely due to a bett...