15-5 seven

This week, it feels like we hit a home run... We have 5 official, cleared documents now! It does indeed feel gratifying. This week has been another week of moving forward. Although, this week it feels like we are pushing many small loads up a hill instead of one gigantic one. Everything (Hardware/Software specification, Treatment Rationale and screen design, evaluation plan, and Thursday's presentation) is slowly but surely being nudged closer to the finish line.

There has been a bit of question lately as to where some tasks end and other begin (at least by job description titles). Sometimes it seems very difficult to decide, when you should get input and when you should individually work. This was a question that I had earlier in the week when I was designing. What do I need to do and hand off to Audra, the programmer? Through my personal deliberation of the week and after asking my team questions, I now understand that there are not clearly defined lines that everyone else is privy to while I am out of the loop! What a relief to find out!

Since I am temporarily finished collaborating with Lindsay on the Treatment Rationale and have already provided feedback on the newest drafts that other team members have created, I will focus my attention this week on more elaborate storyboarding. I hope that we will have more fruitful discussions (much like last week's) on the specific module attributes.

15-5 six

This week studio unfortunately ended up to be a somewhat painful experience. Our communication as a team needed some revamping since everyone's schedules are so different. I thought it was a great action on Carrie's part to make this situation a deliberate item on our agenda on Thursday. It was easily refined by designating that everyone use the wiki discussion page instead of email and by setting a second meeting day for the week as a mini-deadline to keep things flowing better. This past week we made corrections on most of our documents and turned them back in. The timeline was also newly turned in this week for feedback.

This week I did slight revisions on the task analysis and then focused all of my energy on designing. After toiling and producing a general concept, I realized that this part of the project didn't feel right without more of a collaborative element with the team. Of course it was beneficial that I had a prototype to begin a discussion with, but I was very excited by the excellent input others offered.

In the next week, I will continue to flesh out the design that we have started. I will try to solidify some navigation buttons and a banner. We will also need to decide on things such as font and color scheme (as Lindsay and I collaborate on the treatment rationale document).

15-5 five

The notion of stride that Dr. Clinton talked about the second week of class is definitely beginning to sink in (at least for me). Our group has hit a stride this week in how we work and interact with each other. Despite sickness, surgery, and daily life we have revised versions of the needs assessment and scope document, as well as,created a fresh new time line. New work that looks forward was also divvied by our project manager.

Personally, I did my share in the revising stage and even reformatted some documents aesthetically this week. Since that was towards the beginning of the week though, the end of the week was dedicated to beginning the design phase. I have proudly come up with some tentative screen shots that I know will probably need refinement. However, I am not worried about this because I know the team will be very helpful with their feedback. I am still very excited by the concepts that I came up with for these designs and look forward to sharing with the rest of Imaginative Designs on Thursday.

In the upcoming weeks I feel as if I will naturally get busier and busier since the design phase will come into full throttle. I don't anticipate my time to be eaten because of the requests of my teammates though, but more because it is so easy to get sucked into playing with the technology. I will surely have to monitor this!

15-5 four

I definitely have felt the surge of the semester this week. As a team we are communicating and passing documents feverishly. We have completed our task analysis and scope document, gotten a sign off from the client, and now await feedback/approval from the instructor. We have simultaneously begun work on the task analysis, objectives, and timeline. These documents do not seem less difficult in nature (as we erroneously set our selves ups to believe). All in all the week has been a positive one since we've gotten great feedback from the client(s) as per our work thus far.

Individually I focused most of my time this week to the needs assessment. After hitting somewhat of a wall at our last face to face meeting, I was glad to be able to contribute to the team by redirected the document. I also had the opportunity to proofread and provide feedback on the scope document that was headed by Audra.

In other news this week, I had a chance to begin some of my service hours. I made initial contact with my mentee and have since received a question about design through email. It is a relief that this classmate feels comfortable enough to ask questions.

This week I plan to be more proactive about posting my hours to our wiki. While I do think about this task, I seem to forget to actually do the logging. As far as content, I will continue to make correction and stabilize the task analysis document that I took the first crack at this past week. I have been working closely with Lindsay (who is in charge of the first run at the objectives) and Carrie (for feedback and direction) in doing this.

Is it design time yet? :)