Week4

Date: 29th October 2010

As I joined this module late (because of my late application to the MSc course), this was my first lecture. But I've got a general idea about this module, and it's basically talking about how to best design a website so it can be suitable for the user, covering all aspects. As I have a previous experience from one of my modules in the undergraduate, this is going to be an easy assessment for me in my opinion.

For this week, we covered user journeys and the content for each website, so the user can navigate through the website without giving the user the feeling that he is lost, and we should consider all possible barriers and problems the user might face to avoid it.

In this also I've joined the group that I'm going to work with. Our project is about redesigning the website (http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/). The group already started with their work, so I had to catch up with them. It's not easy to join late and start working on such assignments or projects instantly, and also because the group already started to work on the assignment, I guess I'm going to have some troubles catching up and understanding the purpose of it. The group was trying their best to welcome me and to explain what's already done, and what's going to be done in the future. Unfortunately I always have troubles interacting with people I don't know yet, but I'm trying to get over this as fast as possible if I want to gain experience out of this, and also to get good grades.

For this week's group work, we had a brainstorm session about personas, the expected users for the website, depending on interviews done by the group. Then we implemented the same process for the user journeys that was taught in class with these personas.

For the user journeys, we have divided the work between us, we had 3 personas, I was doing the user journey for "Sophie", the librarian, and "Mary", the teacher.

For Sophie, her goals for using the website are:

-Contribute a book review

-Finds top10 sellers or Booker prize winners

Mary:

-Finds a reading group in her area, or start a new one.

At first, and because I still don't have the exact idea of the website, or how are we going to re-design it, I struggled in doing the user journeys, so I decided to do it as I would've imagined the website is going to look like, from the brief idea I got after the group work. Then in our next meeting, I'm going to discuss it with the rest of the group and see if I'm on the right track or not.