DECO1800: Design Computing Studio 1

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 ...