Final Designs & Report

After all the initial research, modelling and designs stages, the final design of the university rugby portal has been completed. Below are screenshots of the home page, a team profile page, a player profile page and the login panel that is presented to the user when they click the 'login' button at the top of the website:





















































As well as completing the designs for the website, I have made a steady start on the final report. Using the feedback provided by my tutor from my initial plan, and the template provided within Blackboard, I have the main structure of the report completed. I aim to have the first few sections completed by the end of this week, so I can move onto the main report section, and completing the sections that I decided upon at the end of the first semester.

Participatory Design Workshop & Report Writing

Using the research and the preparation that I completed for the workshop, plus the help of one fan, player and coach, I was able to successfully complete a series of participatory design sessions to aid the design of the university rugby portal. Unfortunately, the fan was unable to make the workshop on the same day as the player and coach, which meant that they were in a workshop on their own, which may have affected the results obtained.

The main outcomes of the workshop include a good idea of how the users want the website to look and 'feel', and the kind of features that they would like to see present on the site. After the workshops, I thought it would be worth while to draft up these features, and assess what ones are firstly feasible, and secondly necessary for this type of site. A mistake that I could make at this stage is to listen to the user too much, and put in everything that they ask. My priority is to find the right balance between what the users want, and what is actually needed from the perspective of a web designer.

Now that the general idea of what needs to be on the rugby portal has been established, the next step is to actually do some hands on designing, taking into consideration all the data obtained throughout the project (eg. interview findings) to really start designing for the users needs. I aim to have the design proposal for the rugby portal completed by the end of February, providing a good amount of time for any necessary changes, as well as finishing the final report.

Lastly, since the last post I have been using the feedback provided by my tutor for my final report plan to start the first draft of my final report. I now have a good idea of the structure for my report, and what needs to go in each section. I will be emailing my tutor with my introduction and the early sections of my report by Thursday (11th).

Participatory Design Preparation

Since the project meeting with my tutor, I have began the preparation for the design stage of the project, which will commence this week. As the previous 2 weeks have not been university term time, I used the time to contact prospective users of the portal to involve them with the design stage. A coach, a player and a fan agreed to take part in the design activity, which I aim to obtain valuable user information from.

Into The Design Stage

As outlined within the proposal, the progress report and the previous blog entry, the last 2 weeks have been used for the transition from the modelling stage, into the design stage. This has included completing tasks such as storyboarding, sketching and information design, the results of which will be used to enhance the current lo-fi prototypes into a hi-fi prototype. Information on how to complete these tasks were obtained through online journals, tutorials, and handouts from other modules (eg. Interaction Design module for storyboarding)

Because of the Christmas break, some scheduled tasks are yet to be completed, which should not affect the progress of the project because of the flexibility of my project schedule. Tasks such as information design and interaction design, planning the interaction between the user and the portal will now be completed later than scheduled.

The plan is to now use the information obtained within the interviewing stage of the project, which was analysed and processed into requirements, to start placing a design on the current skeleton wireframe prototype. The next weeks will be used to complete the pending tasks, and start to incorporate user input to ensure that requirements and needs of the user are still being met.

Poster Presentation, Christmas & The Next Steps

Since the poster presentation, where the first prototype of the proposed university rugby portal was displayed, I have completed the Progress Report and submitted it to my tutor. Within the report, I briefly discussed how the project has been going, and outlined what I will/will not be completing within the remainder of the project. The main 'out of scope' task is the actual development of the rugby portal. As outlined in the initial project proposal, my project is based around goal-directed design, using in-depth user observations to design for the needs of the users. At the end of the project I will have compiled a design proposal, with supplementing documentation that could be passed onto a development team in order to make the portal a fully functioning system.

Over Christmas, apart from a few days break around Christmas/New Year's Day, I will be continuing with the project, moving into the 'Design' stage. By moving out of the 'Planning/Research' and 'Modelling' stage, I have obtained a good amount of valuable information about the users, now it is time to use this and incorporate it into the design of the system.

Uploaded Files

I have uploaded a few documents to support my poster/presentation, as they may been not visible on the actual poster. Below is one of the personas that I compiled from the information obtained within the user interviews. There is also a competitor analysis, which compares the features of the BBC Sport website, RuckU (a rugby social networking website) and the Oxford University RFC website.

Interview Matrix (Outlining Common Themes & Trends): http://sites.google.com/site/anstooy/Matrix.doc

Competitor Analysis: http://sites.google.com/site/anstooy/CompetitiveAnalysis.docx

Persona (Rugby Coach): http://sites.google.com/site/anstooy/Coach.doc

Poster, Presentation & Prototype Preparation

Since the last post, I have been preparing for the poster presentation session which is on Thursday the 10th. For my poster, I have tried to cover all the sections of the goal directed design process that I have based my project on. Touching on the scope & goals, the poster leads a cycle through research, user interviews and early design stages. The prototype that I have prepared is a static HTML wireframe system that will display a few tasks that the final system will complete, for example, adding the details to a player in a player profile.

As well as preparig for my presentation, I have also been going back to the data obtained through the user interviews and drawing more qualitative data out. I did this by compiling a matrix of all the data obtained and outlining different themes and trends that commonly came up throughout the interview process. The next step of the project is to move more towards the designing stages, taking into consideration user centred design tasks such as cognitive walkthroughs.