Day 6: MacBook Died Last Night

Last night, actually felt the difference while using it as the “Beach Ball” keeps appearing no matter what operation I was trying to perform, even just trying to open a new tab in Chrome. But didn’t thought it would be serious till I wanted to continue my design at home, it wouldn’t boot up!! Luckily, it was just corrupted boot data and not the HDD failing. So installed Lion in and everything seems fine (for now). Haha

Because of this problem, started work late again and ended up almost doing nothing. But work is still work, and I’m the only person working on it. So gathered a few colleagues to choose between the product grouping and true enough, they chose the grouping by process flow as it was easier to understand. That being settled, I was then trying again to draw a nice Rapid Prototype but that would mean it wasn’t rapid at all.

So ended up using Illustrator to construct the wireframes and trying to present at best how the interactions might be. Would be able to ask some friends as a form of User Testing about how they would navigate. Finished up all the primary navigation wireframes, so tomorrow will be the product pages. This phase is getting more and more like the final documentation and looking at how things are slowly forming, it is truly motivating. However, I am afraid much of losing sight of the importance of simplicity. Shall take a break after wireframing to hit it with the simple stick!! Hyaaaaa

Day 5: Had an Appointment with Usability Research Company

Yeap and it was a very insightful visit to their company over at Boat Quay. That’s where Focus Groups and User Testings are being conducted, something I didn’t have the privilege for my project. Nonetheless, was glad to meet like-minded people who cares so much for the users of our applications. Trust me, many developers still don’t. Spent almost an entire day there due to the appointment being scheduled mid noon.

Was working on my Commerce package for only 2 hours and ended up scrapping the banner design simply because it didn’t even excite me, needless to say for the other users. That’s kinda my way to stopping myself when I know I’m coming up with some crappy stuff. But had another idea but Project Butterfly needed more work.

Decided to go into Site Mapping the entire application to know how many pages of wireframes and guess what? I suddenly realized an alternative to grouping the products! So ended up with 2 site maps which I must decide by tomorrow which one is better. The first one groups the products by its type and thats how I ended up with so many buttons. The second one groups the products by it area affected and therefore giving me lesser buttons and enable a certain process flow for the user. I need a 2nd opinion but I’m all alone in the office right now. Shall wait till tomorrow to meet my designers and put it on the table. 

So not much was achieved today, I’m ashamed of myself but somehow glad that the Site Mapping might lead to something better in the end. Means my Paper Prototyping kinda failed its purpose. Wireframes tomorrow and also to decide if user would need to login to use the system, seems redundant as users should not be returning customers for another good 5 years at least.

Day 4: Paper Prototyping and Rapid Prototyping

Spent more time today on the paper prototyping and trying to figure out the interactions. However, this application has more buttons than usual and even the ‘mini-cart’ has to be constantly on the page, taking up quite a lot of screen estate. Decided to make it slide in when needed, hopefully that will be smooth enough for all browsers. Gawd, I hate IE.

Ended up with two different sets of navigational bars, one for the ‘administrative’ stuff like Home, About Us and Contact Us. While the other remains for only for Product Categories and Sub-categories. Glad that I was able to sort out the functionality wireframing but was beginning to worry about the beautified UI as it looks quite bad now. (maybe its my drawing)

So didn’t manage to get on to site map but guessed I will be using the numbering system to create one simple one as the project might grow quite a bit if I’m not careful with the grouping of products. Sadly, I seemed to be crawling in this chapter of the book but hopefully things will start to breeze passed this planning stage. I do recognize that this phase is important and will later save me a lot of trouble from re-coding or re-designing.

On a side note, handling the load of 3 jobs is making me confused as to which I should give first priority but I really love web development and I’m sure this project will fill a need for consumers who are tired of the existing system. I sometimes am afraid I have too much hope for Project Butterfly, but hope is required.

 

Day 3: Didn’t Expect This Much Attention

Realized that some people are following this development blog, which was totally unexpected since I didn’t share at all on any Social Media. But anyway, thanks for reading and I took the Sunday off for badminton with my friends (its’s my only off day, so spare me)

So the results from the survey are in and turns out to be quite interesting. The number 1 issue on consumer’s mind about home renovation is Trust, and design ranks 3rd out of 4. So I guess credibility is really important in this industry than what the designers do. But these are just the general consumer who are concerned more about budget too. No offense to the designers as I know, they do really great difference to a project.

Also got the top 5 “must-have functionalities” and Contact Form is one of them! Wow~ and “social network signing up” didn’t make it. Maybe its the age of the current homeowners and buyers, so social networks are still not a major part of their lives. But this survey really helps me to get a good focus on what is expected (at least in Phase One) and I could build from there.

So I had all these characters made up the previous time and I’m supposed to act as them to use my app but I guessed I had the flow quite well developed in my mind, so all the characters ended performing the same tasks. Hahaha~ will do this exercise once the sitemap is up to test the flow better. 3 clicks to get what I want is a rule of thumb but I hope I can push for 2.

The other 2 following sections of the book requires focus groups, so that kinda put me off. So I just read through to see the thought process and next up, is Paper Prototyping. Gawd, finally we are getting close to coding. Though the method in the book is not the “cut & position” method but its kinda same. Will use my ex-lecturer’s method of “cut & position” as it is faster and take some photos on my phone to store them.

Guess the specifications requirement should be up too. Gonna prepare that and the prototyping. Oh, one problem, the navigation buttons are a handful and I dont think it can be placed comfortably in a row. Need to sort that out and still maintain usability. Much more expectations for tomorrow. 

Day 2: Still reading around IA and UCD

Well, when most people say what you learnt in school is not applicable at work, it really doesn’t applies much to web development.

Reading through chapter 2, its starts with getting market research about what my target audience thinks and feels about the upcoming product and what they might wanna see. So I made a survey on Google Drive and went to Facebook to find a bunch of friends who fitted the profile of users for my application. Now to wait for them to complete it. Its just 5 questions, what is taking them so long?

In the next section, its to create Personas for the application. I recall that in Airene’s class, we were asked to imagine some fictional character to market our product to ( I totally thought that was stupid back then). But now, I’m doing it on my own and made 8 characters! Then I had to imagine how they would behave on my application and how their objectives would be met.

Tomorrow I will continue to run through their imaginary tasks and create a flow. This kinda forms a really UCD approach to the application. Really learnt so much and this practice definitely creates a user-friendly UI! Level up? I guess…

Oh yea, theres also a Conceptual Model which should outline the entire websites, flow of how things would be organized. Its quite similar to a sitemap but its more general which much more emphasis on the entire outline of the project and this serves as a graphical guide to how the entire project should behave.

Day 1: Starting a blog about the development of Project Butterfly

Decided to do this to track my progress and look back after releasing this project to the public. Might be able to learn quite a bit and of course, review the process and proceed from there.

Realized I borrowed a PHP / SQL book that doesn’t really cover the entire process so went to library to get another 2. 3 books that are thicker than a dictionary and only a month of development. Project Rich is looking like ‘mission impossible’ but I’m loving the challenge.

Basically, the entire motivation for me is to clear out the old me and finally step into a phase. Hence the project name is Butterfly. Its going to be beautiful when I’m done. For now, done with chapter one of Info Archi and User Centered Design. The official docs are also gonna be really important for the pitch. Can’t wait to start typing codes or document to get that sense of progress~