Now on Module 4, and with my list of artifacts growing I realize I have to take a step back and assess where I am at in this content creation journey. This week I took time to refine the interview questions in the interview script, continued working on the preliminary wire frames I know I will need as basic components of the app, continued my research and documentation, conducted the interview via email and am continuing to annotate my bibliography. While my project is moving forward, it’s time to self-analyze and reflect on how the project is coming along, what my strengths and weaknesses during this process are, and understanding what continues to work while pivoting on things that need to change.
I feel that a huge challenge that I have faced this semester is starting a new job. The job that I am starting requires long hours and extreme dedication on top of the fact that I am now in school. I have fallen behind in work and am using my Thanksgiving break to bring myself back up to date, but it has been very taxing. This Covid-19 pandemic has changed the game of life for most people and I am nothing short of thankful that I was able to continue working throughout it, but it has brought a new set of challenges to work through. Thankfully, this course for content creation has shown me the importance of planning, tracking, and creating digital content. This is what I do every day at my job as we use the Agile workflow to create software.
I realize that documenting work and keeping artifacts organized and in one place is a crucial part of the workflow a designer will have in a medium to large corporation. The purpose beyond showing what you have worked on, is also to keep a complete record of the process software development goes through including its UI/UX aspects. This allows for teams of designers and engineers to shift if need be and keeps the entire process from research to discovery to design and implementation documented. “Traditionally, in the context of user experience, a deliverable is a document that serves as a record of work that has occurred. The deliverables for a project are the tangible record of the work that occurred, whether that work was research or design. Some of the classic deliverables that come out of UX work are usability-test reports, wireframes and prototypes, site maps, personas, and flowcharts”. (Laubheimer)
This week I continued my work on the wireframes adding a payment section to the wires I started last week. I made a site map that describes the entire layout of the app, and well as task flows for use cases such as making a payment, or donating using the app, etc. Task Flows help guide the design by understanding use cases and entry points that the user would take to accomplish a task in the app. It not only guides the design, but the site maps as well.
Flow-chart:
1 — “a visual representation of the sequence of steps and decisions needed to perform a process.”
2 — “a type of diagram representing a workflow, process or algorithm.” (Mac, 2020)
These artifacts are part of the preliminary research that will guide my designs for this app. With the main part of the research phase out of the way, I will now be focusing on the initial design stages. The wireframes should be finished in about a week and a half, and the prototyping phase, which will be the end of this project should begin. The prototype itself will be clickable and will have an art pass while the wireframes will be simpler and stay in greyscale. As the process continues, I shall keep refining my work bit by bit and week by week. By the end of the next module, I should be caught up with my project schedule and hope to remain on time for the rest of the project.
Sources
Laubheimer, P. (n.d.). Which UX Deliverables Are Most Commonly Created and Shared? Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/common-ux-deliverables/
Mac, R. (2020, September 22). UX Flows, and Why They’re So Confusing. Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://blog.prototypr.io/ux-flows-and-why-theyre-so-confusing-26670b9089d4
Design By Angel Vazquez 