Category Archives: Commentary

Good and bad design is all over the place, this is a place where we can comment on design we see daily.

Project Summary

This post is added to summarise what the UWE Life app project has been about. This blog and the project has been done by Ben Argo, Dushyant Kanungo and Gunnar Petzäll.

It started as an assignment but may be taken up and paid for development by the UWE Students’ Union to be a live app. The team received on average over 70/100 marks (a First) for our individual and group work for the module.

Specification

The specification for this assignment of the lvl 3 Interaction Design module of the Web Design BSc (Hons) degree at the University of the West of England (UWE) asked for the design of an application using user-centered design methodologies that related to geolocation and enhanced the student experience.

The Ideas

A number of ideas were created by the three team mates and made into a synthesis that we were bringing forward.

Research

Research started with a big brainstorming using whiteboard and the first story board envisioned by the team and the first big stakeholder/expert interview.  Additional research included:

Prototyping

Prototyping was done continously from the very first wireframes, more detailed ones and into the PoP prototype. Each of the stages and even each of intermittent sketches were improved by feedback from users taken from our peer group for different levels of user testing.

Following a “working app” with PoP, a first version of High Fidelity prototype was made and was presented to the lecturer and the rest of the cohort.

Feedback from the presentation and further user testing was used to create the final UWE Life app demo available to try. This was also presented (video link will be added here).

First rant about WordPress…

Seriously, why are there both “Categories” and “Tags”? If you go through the trouble of setting up hierarchical tags and (probably) a system for what categories should be used for what posts, why is there ALSO a need for tags?

Surely, categories could be displayed as tags in the post?

So we now have to have a Category to make sorting on the site easy (read: possible) and also tags with exactly the same names so that it’s easy to see what a post is categorised as and see similar posts.

Seriously, WTH? 😛

Edit (2 minutes later):

Ok, the categories are on top of each post, didn’t see that as easily as the lovely tag pictures at the bottom. However, the issue really is the same: Why have to features for one type of function?

Have you ever clicked ‘About Us’ on a website?

When I started my career as a web designer / developer in 2003, the navigation for any website was pretty standard. It primarily consisted of home, about us, products, services, faqs, contact us and sitemap.

Without fail, this navigation existed on every single corporate and business website and only flexible bits were products and services. Be it a university website or personal portfolio, the base structure remained the same.

With the dawn of Human-Computer Interaction sciences, a lot has changed on how we lay out the site structure and design a user experience. Priorities of the information provided from a website is moved from managers to the users. We have seen innovative ideas and industry leaders pushing for user centered design of interaction and information.

But this link still exists: ‘About Us’.

I wonder if people actually visit this page intentional or actually spend more than 5 seconds reading the essay like information written by over-zealous business owners or HR personnel.

I have not. Ever! This is also eminent by going through your website’s analytic information.

So why does it exists?