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.