Prototypes

ADaPT are now just about complete with the Artefacts of Design project. The final stages consist of creating a prototype and heuristic evaluation for the site.

The prototyping phase was where things really started coming together. Each of the team members had different ideas for how they wanted to represent things - this was captured in the storyboarding process. I am forever the pragmatist, so I wanted to see things in action. The other two team members were looking at the bigger picture, so I suppose we had a Macro, Meso and Micro approach.

When it came time to prototype and bring the storyboards together, it was good to see how our ideas fitted together, you really could see the logical flow of our ideas - it was very exciting.

To start things off, all the team had an elluminate session. This was to decide on who was doing what for prototyping. I had taken the prototype feature table and created a shortlist that condensed some of the tasks as there were a few overlaps, that was handy for allocating tasks among the team members. I had a couple of jobs for prototyping: The first one was to take my original story board and create a concrete example of how formative assessments, resources, multimedia artefacts and summative assessment would tie together in a design based course. From this I created a Prezi that featured Don, my persona and how he could apply the example. The second job I had was to redesign the prototype section on the site and bring all our resources together. I noticed another team had created a nice menu system on their site, so I decided to do the same. I took me a while to get things organised, about 4 hours, as the AoD site was running quite slow and odd things were happening.

Once everything was on it was a mighty relief to the team, you could see things coming together and how our site would be useful in the assessment design context and at different levels. Unfortunately we lost a team member around this time. It didn't really come as any surprise as the team member was struggling to get to grips with what we were trying to do. The member created a blog post and described he wasn't enjoying the process, but enjoyed being part of the team.

The prototyping process was very useful as it provided a space for bringing our ideas into a useable package where you could see the direction in which we were heading. The only limitations was that time was against us.

Reflecting back to the very beginning of block 3, I remember thinking (I may have even posted somewhere) that working online as a team was probably going to be the biggest constraint, it in fact turned out to be the opposite, it was an absolute pleasure, thanks to my team mates of course. I probably worked better and more efficiently in this team than I have in many face-to face teams.