Week 2: Tech Research, Tech setup, Gold Spike
Week 2 saw great strides made for the team in all three departments. While relatively little building was done, a great deal of research was done. This research will likely save time and effort later, given the significance of its results. Additionally, said research is now tied to concrete deliverables to guarantee deliverable progress.
By discipline progress in week 2 appeared as follows.
Design:
-Created Use-case diagram, a tool that visually represents types of users and chunks of functionality. While initially confusing/detail rich for our client, the use-case diagram will allow our team to pick first features for the prototype while the full Service Design Doc is finished
Use-Case Diagram. Users are listed vertically on the left.
Features are displayed as Circles on the right. Access/Verbs connect Users to Features
-Attended and documented 3 virtual museum tours (Tenement Museum, Fallingwater, and Louvre). These virtual experiences are being compared to yield a common set of traits or rubric of successful experiences. While such a breakdown might not be directly necessary to develop virtual tours (museums have been giving tours without comparison to comparables for several centuries at this point), such a breakdown provides a sense of what experiences might be desired by our 5 client institutions.
Tech:
-Consulted 3 ETC Faculty with non-profit Web dev experience (Michael Christel, Steve Audia, Bryan Maher)
-Chose front-end/back-end tools based on their recommendation: WordPress.org CMS
-Chose development hosting: Pantheon
-Presented initial cost assessment and hosting requirements
-Created Gold spike
Fire was noticed after diagram was made and determined to be useful to metaphor
ETC Requirements:
-drafted initial logo designs
Production:
-Drafted Project schedule/Milestones for Quarters and Halves
Originally created for Client reference with respect to ETC deadlines.
Overall, a relatively productive week that answered most technical implementation questions (especially given the 4 day week). I remain confident that we will make good progress on some sort of usable WordPress site by Quarters. I also remain confident that we’ll be able to move through user testing before Halves. A possibility is to allow Museums to conduct tours with this tool BEFORE the end of the Semester and gather feedback from users/guests during this semester. Afterall, the best testing environment is a live environment.
Goals for next week are as follows:
-Select which features to program/build from the Use-Case diagram
-Meet with Accessibility expert from the Frick Museum
-Meet with Museums individually to review assumptions about User Experience/Protocol
-Create initial features on Pantheon-hosted wordpress site