tl;dr Plan your website In the first milestone, you will completely plan your website. You will conduct user research, explore design patterns in similar sites, and re-design the Apple Festival Harvest website.
All design planning should go in the design journey. The design journey is located in the design-plan folder of your project’s repository.
Project Document Summary:
Coding Resources:
| Submissions | Deadline | Slip Day Deadline | Credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milestone 1 (p2m1) | Wed 3/6, 11:59pm | Thu 3/7, 11:59pm | 36 points (correctness) |
| Milestone 2 (p2m2) | Wed 3/13, 11:59pm | Thu 3/14, 11:59pm | 52 points (correctness) |
| Final Submission (p2fin) | Wed 3/20, 11:59pm | Thu 3/21, 11:59pm | 100 points(correctness) |
When working for a client, you’ll need to check their requirements frequently to ensure you’re meeting their expectations. You don’t want to spend weeks working on something only to discover at the last minute that what you’ve been working on doesn’t meet their requirements.
Please read the project overview and project requirements.
To identify the goals of your audience, you will conduct user interviews with a minimum of 3 separate users. You may interview more users if you wish. The users may not be your friends or family.
First plan out your interview. We’ve provided a template interview in the design journey. You may use this template (or not). Regardless of whether you use the template, you are required to author 3 of your own user interview questions.
When interviewing your users, you are required to take thorough notes.
All design planning should go in the design journey. The design journey is located in the design-plan folder of your project’s repository.
Recall that usable and accessible websites leverage a familiar design. You do not need to create a completely original and unique layout for this website. If you do, you will likely find that your test audience has trouble navigating the website and completing the test tasks. Studying existing designs can improve the usability of our own site’s design.
When exploring the design of these websites, resize your browser window to both narrow and wide device widths. Observe how the design responds to changing “characteristics.”
Complete the “Website Design Exploration” section in the design journey.
Design an engaging Apple Harvest Festival site for your audience. Follow the design process:
Your site need not be large. Project 2 is designed to be a modest site. About 3 pages with moderate content on each page
You are encouraged to use the instructor provided content in the design-plan folder. Do not include all instructor provided content “just to be safe.”
Tip: If you’re using a bunch, but not all, of the instructor provided content, you’ve probably got enough content.
Make sure you think about the choices you make as you’re designing: is the structure, content, and look and feel well-suited to your audience? Can you give a good rationale for decisions you made, in terms of your interview data, course concepts, personal experiences, examples from similar sites, and other info you can bring to bear on the design process?
Design your “narrow” (i.e. mobile) version of your site first, then the “wide” (i.e. desktop) version.
You should submit sketches for each page you plan to include in your final website. Each web page should have a mobile sketch and a desktop sketch of the entire page. Clearly label and explain each sketch.
Your sketches must be hand-drawn on paper (preferred) or tablet. Take a photo and include them in your design-journey.md. Digital “drawings”/diagrams with perfectly straight lines and typed text will not be accepted. Sketches are intended to be rough, draft-like line drawings that have enough detail to understand what the final page will look like. Lines don’t need to be ruler straight. Handwriting need not be perfect. Squiggly lines to show that a big text of paragraph goes here are okay. Sketches should not be polished. If they look polished, then you are not creating a sketch!
The design journey documents your workflow and design process as you develop your website. It should be a valuable use of your time, articulating things we cannot see directly in your final website: the alternatives, the justifications, the processes. Articulating reasons is important for convincing us, future teammates, clients, bosses, and yourself that you’re making good choices, and you know what you’re talking about. If your design journey simply says what you actually did, it is not useful for us and will be a waste of time for you.
You may stage, commit, and push as many times as you want to back up your work.
Please don’t wait until the last minute; technologies don’t always cooperate and require some fiddling, especially the first time you use them.
All design/planning images must be visible in your design journey when using “Markdown: Open Preview”. We are unable to provide credit for images not visible in the Markdown preview.
Stage, commit and push all changed files in your Git repository to GitHub. (All commits must reside on the main branch.)
Then, complete the submission form.
Note: All files must be in the location specified in this document for credit; our grading process cannot reliably locate your work in other locations.