Newsletter – Week 7 – Building The Voyage
Building The Voyage
This week, we began to reap the rewards of spending many hours touring the museums. The staff at both of the museums has been beyond useful and their passion for their fields is contagious. Additionally, we have spent time building our experience’s tours and the system that will be used to develop it. While Halves are fast approaching, we are making good progress toward having a function prototype online.
Database Design
Early this week, we approved the database design for phase one of our project. Some of the challenges its design addresses is the need to track not only connections between items on display, but also that these items might be used in multiple tours and as such may have multiple connections assigned to them. Overall, it’s a complex design, but by the end of the week it had been built in MySQL and it is now ready to be populated and have our queries written for it.
Tour Design
The latter part of this week was set aside for discussing a few prototype tours. During this meeting, we worked on four tours: The Pittsburgher, The Naturalist, The Fashionista, and The Maker. We were pretty productive, but realized that our biggest challenge now was less about connections between items, and more about how to order the items in a way that makes physically travelling from one to the next easy. To this end, we will be walking our tours in the museum early next week to survey any navigational problems and look around to see any items that a guest would walk by that might be worth including.
Moving Forward
Next week, we will continue our focus on the creation of content for the museum tours. First, we will be walking the prototype tours we’ve outlined so far. After that, we have planned a client meeting to discuss the material and points where we either have loose ends or simply need more information. Once this is complete, we can begin populating our databases and continuing the actual development of the frontend side of the application.