DECO1800: Design Computing Studio 1

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...