Planning, planning, planning (Week 4)

 

This week has been spent immersed in the planning phase of development. Caitlin, Kyle, and Jordana returned from the conference they attended in Germany, so we were able to meet with them and go over our proposals in detail. Monday we learned about paper prototypes (and German candy!). Genevieve, Michael, Reilly, and I decided to combine our paper prototypes into one, all-encompassing paper prototype that incorporates all the different aspects of the website that we’re working on. We worked on this most of the day. Tuesday the whole lab group (with the exception of Jordana, who was stuck at Jury duty) met and went over the proposals.

The gist of my proposal was approved, and I received a lot of helpful feedback regarding things to think about and how to implement various aspects of my proposal. I need to suss out the exact details and order of my Magic sort before beginning to implement it.  Automatic bookmarks and followings were also accepted as good ideas to implement, and I’ll need to sort out the specific details regarding both of those.

The mouse-over playing card idea for the users index went over well, with just a few design changes. (Users could perhaps customize what information to display on the back, whether that is their top world, top challenge, top badge, “About Me” description, etc.) The mouse-over world partial display, showing the thumbnail and title and only giving more information on the “back” of the partial, was met with more hesitation. What if the thumbnail of a world is a poor indication of the world’s content? Kyle suggested implementing a fade-through slideshow on the thumbnail that displays a progression of scenes throughout the world. This should give users a clearer indication of the world’s content without covering the index page in text and white space. Although everyone agreed that making the website more picture-heavy and interactive was a good thing, especially given that our target audience is middle school aged children, Kyle made the point that mouse-over technology fails on devices like iPads, iPods, and mobile phones. I will need to think about a fall back layout and functionality for all the mouse-over animations in case the user views our site from a device without a permanently present mouse.

Given that Jordana was unable to be at the meeting on Tuesday and is in charge of Community-side projects, Genevieve, Reilly, and I met with her on Wednesday. Prior to the meeting, I drafted a list of all the things that somewhat relate (or not) to my project (following/ role modeling) that I think would be good to implement on the website. I sorted the items on this list into three categories: things that I will accomplish this summer, things I would like to tackle this summer, and things that would be great for future developers to implement.

By the end of the meeting, Jordana and I agreed that my goals seemed to be straying from the realms of following and role modeling. We talked about it and both felt comfortable re-categorizing my project area “User experience”. My summer goals are as follows:

Going To Do:

(1)Magic sort: (challenge index, worlds index, users index, world show “suggested” bar)

•  Important because that’s the whole point of following someone: having the worlds shown to you be more customized and being able to learn from a specific user and their actions
• Following someone changes the order in which badges are recommended to a user, based on the followee’s path of success
• Seems like an important part of following, but is hinged on the way badges are organized, which is still being explored.

(2)Auto-bookmarks and auto-followings

• Important because if a user resists goal setting and following, we still want to be able to show him/her useful, appropriate examples.
• ***A user can remove an auto-bookmark or unfollow an auto-followed user explicitly.

(3.1)Users index CSS things

• The site should direct attention to programming and learning, not to social networking. The users index re-design can connect a user with the world, challenge, or badge he/she is most proud of, drawing the focus to their actions and skills, rather than their description.

 (3.2)World index CSS things

• If I’m changing which worlds are shown to users, I may as well reformat it so that worlds are shown in a better way also. Successful kids’ sites are more image-heavy and have less of an emphasis on text. I want to display worlds in a way that is picture-focused but still provides adequate information about a world for ease of browsing.

 (3.3)Worlds/Users sub-bar and its functionality

• For site cohesion, and to possibly get rid of the user profile menu/section, the worlds and users pages should have horizontal sub-bars like challenges. This sub-bar will help sort out different relevant collections of worlds/users, and will cleanly organize the content that might be helpful to a user.

 

Would like to do (if I have time):

Remove the profile menu (on the right side of the top navigation bar) and integrate its content into the regular menu bar and its sub-menus.

• Given that some of my “Going to Do” tasks place content from the profile menu into the main site area, the need for the separate profile menu seems greatly reduced.

Homepage: make it more useful, so that users benefit from returning there

• The homepage should be useful and compelling for users to return to, so the feed should be useful and sort-able by all vs. relevant-to-you.
• The users, worlds, and challenges displayed on the homepage should be the top on the site, so that users are still exposed to those worlds, even if they’re not deemed the most appropriate. The better suited ones would be present on the individual worlds, challenges, and users index pages.

 

Today (Thursday) I outlined a week-by-week plan for the rest of the summer, describing the steps I will take in completing my “Going to do” and “Would like to do” tasks and roughly when each step will be completed, or at least ongoing. I then began working out the details of Magic sort for worlds, challenges, and users in each of a set of situations (anonymous user, logged in user, user that has set a goal badge, user that follows other users, combinations of these situations).

 

My plan now, is to (1) finish working out Magic sort, (2) finish drawing sketches/ paper prototypes of the most up-to-date versions of my webpage designs, (3) finalize my week-by-week schedule and run it by Jordana, and then (4) start coding!