Newsletter – Week 4 – Continued Refinement
Continued Refinement
During the past week, we worked to revise and narrow down our proposed idea. To do this, we continued evaluating our clients’ needs as well as the time we have left and what obstacles we’ve come across so far. We have also taken the time to more thoroughly document and breakdown our idea. This has served three purposes. The first is that it ensures that we, as a team, have a solid blueprint to work off of and understand. The second is that it allowed us to notice a few complexities in our design that were not immediately evident, such as the level of detail and types of information our databases will be required to store. And finally, it will provide for us a document to share with our clients and faculty, which outlines, pretty specifically, what we’ll be accomplishing this semester.
Narrowing Scope
This week, in the process of documenting what we plan to create, we discovered some added layers of complexity in our design. As a result of this, we made the decision to first pursue only the product’s “fully-curated mode” at this point. We are still leaving the door open to our tag-powered mode, but are more concerned with getting the guided mode polished and operational before building more onto it. This mode also aligns most directly with the museum’s goals of creating an experience in which both the Art and Natural History sides are included cohesively.
Our client meeting this week went well. We discussed our progress when it came to branding our project and presented them an initial written draft of how we intend to move forward. One of our largest sticking points, the production of content to include within our “archetype” concept, was also partially resolved during the meeting as our clients are willing to give us access to the museum’s numerous curators who may be able to help us. We are also considering the inclusion of a possible audio element to further specify the connections between items.
Moving Forward
Next week is quarters at the ETC and we are set to be presenting on Friday. In that time, we’ll be working on a revised production schedule, version control, continuing UI discussion, and developing a paper prototype to present to faculty for feedback.