Preparing for the Symposium

Tomorrow is the Research Symposium. That means that this week was all about preparing my talk and my poster.

I started out with great intentions to fix/add in design stuff around the websites to use in my screenshots for the poster and the talk. I did end up accomplishing a lot of it (visualization of the badges on the world show page, fixing the formatting of the badges info page, adding helpful worlds to the badges info page, and adding in some more descriptive sentences) which you can see on the attached poster.

As always, in the midst of fixing a whole bunch of things, I began to re-think my organizational system. Since each badge category has four levels that do essentially the same thing, it may be worthwhile to think about having each of those levels be a subclass for the badge category.

There also reached a point where time was of the essence and if I wanted to have certain things visualized on the website (like badge icons with the number of badges earned on the user thumbnails), I would have had to input a hack-ish solution that I would then have to take out later. So,  I decided that since I just need visuals anyway, it would be a better use of my time to mock up the screen shots using Inkscape.

Writing the talk and laying out the poster was a really great way to take a new look at the way I’ve been thinking about things. For instance, I was really set on having gears be the visualization for the badge levels, but I don’t know if the user will make the connection between the mushroom badges on their profile page and the the gears on the thumbnails. We talked a little bit last week about making the badges look more like ribbons in order to solve the issue of similar colors and the remix borders not being apparent enough. It may be worthwhile now that I have badges up and on the site to think about the design again.