Week 11 - finalising our project

The project is nearly complete and we have been contacted by Jack advising he is in Alice Springs!

This means several sections are not complete!

Having other courses will probably mean we will have to sacrifice some work to complete others.

Pretty disappointing.

So the Google API zoom in/out features need to be sorted out.

CSS is still not where it needs to be.

That being said, the site is looking pretty good.

Final Project

Well we got it done, maybe not everything we wanted to do, but it's done!

Here is a screen shot:

We were able to provide a help function and social media sharing using the FB authentication.  We were also able to show a graph for the year scrolling bar, which indicates where the majority of results might be.

However, the piece of Javascript that works amazing is the pie graph breaking down where the news report is coming from.  This makes the whole searching far more interesting that we could of thought of!

In summary, it's a shame we lost a team member for the last 4 weeks, we really didn't see that coming.  When you are reliant on someone to keep their end of the bargain and they don't do it, it's a real shame.  The lesson here is that we should of held him accountable as per the team charter and we didn't.  Had we done that, we would of found out earlier that he had left University study altogether and could of progressed more in the project.

Week 10 - what we need to do next

After the break, as a team we haven't heard from Jack at all.  Several major sections assigned to him are not done and concern is starting to creep in when we will here from him.

After doing the paper prototyping and seeing the feedback from that, as a team there are some tasks still required as follows:

1.  The concept is of interest
2.  Our paper prototype was useful and engaging as the concept is
3.  People are still unclear about how to get search results
4.  People found that the statistics bar which we hadn't created was of great interest
5.  The year timeline scroll bar was of interest

As a team of now 3, we talked about still getting the logo in place, as it wasn't.  I worked with Dan to place the logo in the search area, right at the very top.  We worked on creating greater "space" within the CSS as well.  

Week 9 - Paper prototypes & our progress report

Well we are so far ahead at this point, we could nearly submit this concept as a final work.

This reflects on the hard work we did in the first 5 weeks!

Having everyone see our progress so far has really impressed people, but again, they provide little to zero feedback.

I created a survey for people to respond to for feedback, here is what it looked like:

Here is the feedback we got:

Week 8 - Progress has been made

Building up the documentation for the Progress report was left to Jack and myself, however Jack seems pretty distant and not engaging in any work.

I get the feeling that maybe Jack isn't interested in the course, noted from his lack of input to date.  Great guy, but clearly distracted and has interests elsewhere.

I put together a document for the team to input into for the progress report and provided most of the content.

Working with Hanson on some errors he is getting with scripting, but honestly, I'm only helping with the obvious, I guess it's handy having a second set of eyes on your code.

Week 7 - the quiet week

The team energy is slowing down dramatically, but I suspect that's mostly to do with the fact we have mostly completed our final project.

I worked on some Javascript, but nothing anywhere near as good as what Hanson has done.  Being a 4th year IT student working on AI, I couldn't even begin to produce what he is doing.

It makes me reflect in how I need to improve my coding skills.

I learnt in the workshop in the nature of Javascipting, the Trove API call in specific.  In how Javascript calls all the information at once and there is no set order.  This is the problem we are facing in trying to get better search results.

Week 6 - critiquing & concept progress

Working with the team, we discussed many elements of the structure of the site.  I was running team meetings and leading discussion on design.

Hanson lead the discussion on the coding side.

We decided on the following direction:

1.  Call all the results in from the Trove API call upon searching and limit it to 500 results.
2.  Limit the Google API map, for max zoom out and max zoom in.
3.  Current CSS theming was not in line with original concept work

After last weeks session of critiquing others works, I felt like the quality of the critiques I gave were high quality and would enable others to see some areas of opportunity.

However, the quality of feedback from others towards our concept, was very limited and even after strong encouragement to provide any feedback, we really didn't receive enough quality feedback.

I think the lesson here is to maybe have rewards such as lollies and sweets to really encourage the feedback.  I think also our progress was well in advance to others and maybe other students were a little put off on the fact we were so far ahead.

Week 5 - poster & pitch!

I had my work cut out for me here.

As a team we discussed a strengths based approach to tasks and it was my clear strength to pitch a poster to an audience.

Whilst Dan was helpful, his abilities with posters were not of a standard worthy of presenting, so we agreed as a team I would work harder at this point and less on other technical issues.

A part of the poster was to come up with a flow of how it all would flow from a process, detail the concept so that the audience could understand what was being done.

One of the first things we looked at was a Website mockup of what we wanted it to look like.  This particular task was started by myself a week earlier.  Here are some designs I worked on, you can also see the previous logo work as well:

These were created in Adobe Illustrator, where each element was created/designed by myself.  

Then I went into Adobe InDesign to produce the poster, where I made changes to the map above and created a whole bunch of other elements to present.  Here is the mockup of the poster with pig latin for the text:

Here is the final version that I printed on A3 paper for the pitch.

The organisation of the pitch of what to say, who was saying what, was driven by myself.  The other 3 team mates expressed concern over their abilities, so we decided that I would lead and intro each of them into certain specific subjects.

Week 4 - Change of plans & we hate Trove

What seemed like a great idea at the time, didn't turn out to be so great considering we have to use Trove.  In reflection, some tutors have suggested we could make it work, but we can't see it and have made the decision to change.

Why?  Well Trove doesn't allow currently for "people" searching, it's a feature/function disabled or not enabled, and this was one of the key elements of our concept.

After research by myself and Hanson, we decided to change concept, but keep it along the lines of what we needed to do.

I lead these discussions with our team and we came up with "News Over Time".

One of the inspirations for this was the knowledge of how so many news organisations are owned by only a few people, see the image below:

One of our first logo designs was done by Dan, but as a team we felt that this was missing some quality from a design perspective:

Again, the team felt I could provide some options here, so I came up with this rough draft:

However, we discussed as a team that the shading didn't quite work, though I did prefer it, we ran with the following:

The type was changed to reflect a more "news theme", than the original font designed by Dan.

The colour theme was something that Dan and I worked on together, however, Dan was the primary person.  A few of his earlier ideas were not suitable and I gave design colour theming advice.  I would show this work, but for some reason it has been deleted from Slack and I'm unable to show any imagery work.  What I can say is that the red is "watermelon red", the 2 shades of grey and the light blue is "sky blue".

Week 4 - website layout

Using Adobe draw I came up with this overall layout/design for our concept.  The colour theme was chosen as CMYK colours, as they would work well for the poster design as well.

This layout theme was to keep things simple, elegant and only provide the information we wanted to provide.  Too often website become too complicated, especially news sites, so the theory after research was to keep it simple.

Week 3 - forming teams & concept design

This week we discussed ideas and formed teams.

There were a few points of interest held by the group, which in the end most helped form the initial idea of "Family Search over Time".

With that in mind, it was clear that I was going to be the leader.  It's something I try to avoid being a mature aged student as I often get stuck with this role.  I do believe in giving the other team members the opportunity of leadership as I find this is where you learn the most.

We didn't openly discuss roles at this stage, but we did go over our skill sets, which made a huge difference.

It was agreed that Dan and myself would fool around with a logo design for Family Search over Time.  Here are a few of the sketches I did.

This was iterated over about 6 times, where I finally come up with the following final version:

Week 3 - creating a team charter

Being the mature aged student, I put together a team charter, as my last team for last semester ended badly with people not putting in the required and agreed effort.

Here is my first draft of a team charter that I did from scratch:

I was told by the lecturer that they have an example already, so we decided to run with that, which I edited to suit what the team wanted.

Week 2 - how important is the design process?

What is design?  Some would suggest it is about creating functional and usable products or services, with purpose.  It can be building on the ideas of others, having discourse around ideas.  Planning and making decisions about something, where satisfying the needs of customers.  It can be defined as not implementation.  It is helpful to define the problem as a critical step in the design process.

Designing is an art form that requires skills, either learnt or raw talent.  It starts off with a challenge.

Design isn't about a single output, but rather redesigning, which can be a constant as a process, rather than an irregularity.

Jay?? Dyson who was an engineer was stuck at home and decided to improve the vacuum cleaner after much frustration trying to use it.  He has come up with what is in my humble opinion, the world's best domestic vacuum cleaner.  Focusing on air flow and filters, he made another concept much smaller to improve the overall design of the vacuum cleaner, to produce the quality range that is Dyson today.  It's amazing what can start off with a simple idea and with great persistence, can produce such outstanding results.

In the lecture, I see myself as a strong designer, a weak programmer, if I can even call it that.  I started off this semester feeling that this is ok, but in reflection, I suspect I am going to have to be more of a programmer.  This means for 1800, I need to involve myself more in the coding side to grow basic skills into intermediate skills.

The quote from Abraham Maslow, famous for Maslow's laws of heirarchy, "if you only have a hammer as a tool, every challenge looks like a nail".   I see this as an inference to have more "tools in the shed", or more skills as a person, so that I can see the challenges or problems in different lights or ways to approach them.

I suppose there is a level of fear of the unknown, not being able to code like others, can't really do JavaScript, can't really do HTML or CSS as well as others.  I need to put fear to the side, be open and "available" to new ideas that I can let the course change me.  There is a story about coffee beans, an egg & a carrot in boiling water.  The carrot becomes soft and squishy after being in hot water.  The egg becomes hard and brittle, yet the coffee beans adapts and changes the water itself.  That's what I need to be, a coffee bean.

I believe it's important to accept that there are no optimal "endpoint" to design, sometimes it arrives where it's a case of "this will do".

Being aware of the process, of creating, testing & revising is what design is about.  It's not the outcome that's important for this course, but rather the journey ahead.

DECO1800 - the journey begins

Being presented today with the concept of using Trove database, reminds of me last time I used it.  Trove is a nightmare.  It's quality of data is at best fair and it's mostly poor.  That is it has gaps of data and it's not exactly easy to use.  That being said, finding a good data source of interest to the group will be the key.

Building a team is a critical component to this learning process, in that having a wide range of experiences is critical.  Having experienced a poor team structure in other learning environments, it's clear to me that my strengths are in design and content creation.  Also I would include team structure and organisation.  I need to find individuals that suit this to increase my input into the team.

It's important to critique fluently and with great transparency.  Equally, understanding now that things may not work as one would hope and working through those challenges is a part of the learning process.

In summary, knowing my strengths and weaknesses, it's important to work on my weaknesses and utilise my strengths for whatever team I'm involved in.