Week 8 would prove to be a watershed moment for the team due to Halves feedback, process grades, and conversations with Ana regarding future development. 

Halves Feedback: Playtest to prove functionality. The halves presentation was fairly straightforward. The team opted for a live demonstration of the website in its current state which was fairly well received. Perhaps the greatest flaw of the presentation itself was its playtest section, which failed to communicate the playtest data underpinning our design choices. If we were aiming for an intuitive tool, why do we split the website in half with the Dashboard and Front-end? This sentiment was echoed in our process grades. While our website appeared to meet the minimum functional needs expressed by Ana and the museums, there appeared to be little playtest evidence for it actually working. This was true. The process grade reflected this with the subsequent grade placing the team on academic warning. This came as a blow to the team’s morale, but nonetheless served as a sobering experience and call to action for each of us. The last few weeks had been challenging, but the grade was merited: none of our previous designs were rooted in actual playtests with the final users of the website. In order to improve the grade, the team would need to justify future work with playtesting and feedback. 

Client Transparency through a Backlog: Dovetailing from the halves feedback to better understand the final users of the website via playtesting, the team took conscious efforts to establish a transparent relationship with Ana. The team took steps to establish a clear understanding of needs that remained unsolved by the current build. These needs were written as user stories. In this instance, the very act of talking through Ana’s needs and how the current website fails to meet those needs went very far to reestablish trust. Additionally, for the first time in the Semester, Ana understood what the website could do. Based on this conversation with Ana we chose the following systems to complete: 

1. Website Look-and-feel: the website is minimally functional, the team should now work to make it presentable to museum guests and accommodate museum-specific branding 
2. Cycle Stops: The website is currently designed to force users to move between stops by closing out of presentation view and selecting a new stop from the Tour page. 
3. Audio/Video support: All clients expect support for audio/video files. The final website should ship with audio and video file support.

Playtesting goals: Given that the core functionality is relatively close to complete, future playtesting should evaluate one of the following goals 

1. Onboarding: Do the current materials provide enough information for a naive user to access the basic features of a given role? Does the Educator guide show a person how to upload media and create a new tour? Etc.
   
2. Usability: Does the current website meet the needs of a given role? Can a museum educator upload and assemble a tour with the website as currently implemented? Can a museum docent host a tour that has been assembled (either by a coworker or by him or herself)? 

Beyond these two core playtesting goals are a few other stretch playtests that the team could consider once the website is fully functional and documentation is sufficient to onboard naive guests. 

To test Usability (does what we have built so far meet the needs of museum staff to construct and present a tour?) the team scheduled playtests with Rebecca Lombardi of the ETC as well as Amanda Gillem and Kelsie Paul of the Frick Pittsburgh. These playtests will also include live guests in order to force our playtesters to prepare fully. Naive guest playtesters were provided by Shirl Saldamarco’s Guest Experience class and from naive ETC grad students.