Hi John, I designed and instructed a class last Spring at Virginia Tech, "Designing UX for the Web," and it was meant to be a very hands-on sort of class. One of the assignments (mid-term) was for the students to assume that they had landed an architectural firm as a client who wanted a redesign of their website - with a particular emphasis on improving the portfolio section.
My objective was to get the students thinking about the flow of moving from the home page to detailed information about a particular building project. Something we as professionals are often asked to do - move people from broad content to details so that decisions can be made. The content was based off of a real architectural firm's site with about 60 building projects of varying detail. However, they had to accommodate the fact that sometimes there was a page of info on a given building, sometimes there was only a paragraph. Sometimes there was one photo, sometimes there were 6. Imperfect content, just like the real world. The students made sketches, revisions, wireframes, tried them out on each other, and then we video taped a paper wizard of oz simulating clicking from the home page, through galleries, and eventually to building details. (with real content and real interactions on high-def paper prototypes.) The students then made comps of their pages and presented them to the class. This was a pretty big assignment, but the students really enjoyed seeing the fruits of their labor and gained skills in creating navigational systems, information architectures, and interaction designs. JD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=43246 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
