Last week of class and not really much homework.  However, I’ve been working on planning out the next few weeks before the summer semester begins.  At work, we just finished up launching our new website which I was able to apply some of class knowledge to.  It’s helpful to be working on real life issues while learning solutions at the same time, but it’s definitely busy.  I’m looking forward to implementing the changes from this class as I think it will make Farmur more useful to people.  Ultimately, if my target audience doesn’t find it useful, it’ll feel like a big waste of time—when I do something, I want to do it right!  Here’s to continuing to improve ideas and growing in along the way.

We spent our time this week on planning out the remainder of our thesis timeline and creating a chart to represent this.  I started this timeline months ago, but I have had to repeatedly revise it since I started working full time. I honestly can’t believe how busy this year.  It is nonstop and day and night.  I knew it would be tough going into it, but I can’t ever recommend people work full time and go to graduate school.  Doing just three classes will take me the entire year of continuous classes in the evenings.  My breaks are filled with catching up on thesis project things that during the semester I couldn’t touch. This timeline reflects the current plan as I come into my final two classes — hopefully it doesn’t need to change again.

Updated Project Timeline

Coming out of a week of testing, my focus has shifted to solutions and updates to my thesis.  One of the biggest overhauls is adding a global navigation menu as well as tweaks to the page navigation.  My major focus has been to make hopping around easier, and not locking a user into one direction.  I added better labeling, more prominent cues to next steps, and moved all the navigation items together on the left hand side.  I found that my UI elements were being scattered and I think keeping them together will help with overall confusion.

Lastly, we were asked to create a master document with that outlines our current user interface design.  This was a lot of collecting files from the class over the semester, and putting them into one document.  There is a next steps section at the end that outlines what I plan to do next.

Updated Navigation Mechanism Current User Interface Design

More user testing this week, and a summary of all my testing from this round. The two new testers I worked with were named Greg and John.   John and Greg both are pretty harsh critics and Greg had lots of input.  Both thought the site was usable and intriguing, but both also felt a few tweaks were needed before it became very useful.  Greg thought some of the numbers were not correct, but they were straight from the US government.  After a discussion about my sources, he still disagreed that the estimated food costs for him were way off.  The truth is, I realized that my target audience probably has a tighter budget than him, and I should probably add this to my persona profiles.

One of the biggest things I learned during this round of testing was that I needed to work on my global navigation and standardize my user interface iconography a bit more.  I will have to come up with a few major solutions to fix my navigation mechanism, but I think it will make my project much more user friendly.  Some of my testers expressed that they would be hopping around and ignoring the flow I designed, so it’s going to be important to plan for this type of user.

User Testing Round 2 Summary of Usability Testing

I performed a round of user testing this week with James, Angela, and Sarah.  I learned quite a bit already, and I’m excited to talk with my next two participants next week. James found the idea very compelling, and he was looking forward to using it more. He had a keen eye towards spotting a lot of my unfinished work and had some helpful suggestions to improve the UI. Angela had issues with navigation and moving through the actual site.  She had a few great suggestions and ideas to improve pages I hadn’t even built yet.  Sarah also had issues with the navigation and her suggestions were aimed at proper labeling and positioning.

User Testing Results Round 1

I found myself revisiting my old user testing task list and script this week. I have performed numerous changes since this last test, but the basic ideas were still intact.  I had changed a lot of the names and rearranged pages, so I had to rethink the flow of the document. I enjoy coming up with tests like this, it helps me think about the user more clearly, even before I perform the test.  It makes the design more practical and begins measuring all the fine details.

Test Task List & Scripts

The assignment this week was to design three screens from our thesis project.  Since I have already started this process, and been through Visual Design, I took this opportunity to show the progression from wireframe, to high fidelity prototype, to current design.  I’m still not finished with some of my visual elements, but this was a fun assignment to get a feel for progression over time.

Visual Design Assessment

For this week’s assignment, we created storyboards, a storyboard sequence plan, and updated 3 wireframes.  The storyboards are used in the sequence plan, and the sequence plan outlines the exact steps a user would take to complete a specific task.  The feedback I received was that my storyboards should have included more “story.”  My plan is to go back and revise them to be more interesting and less step-by-step instructions.

Storyboards Wireframes Storyboard Sequence Plan

I thought this week was pretty helpful in auditing the current interface.  We were asked to take all the various navigation mechanisms and compile them into one sheet with a simple description about what each component does.  This is helpful as I start to refine the overall navigation of the entire site and think about subtle improvements.

Navigation Mechanism

This week we updated/created our information architecture.  I don’t have OmniGraffle on this computer, so I’ll have to export a pdf later and upload it here. Work is really busy…