Assignment on Group Project

Establishing Ground Rules and Group Design

This question carries 10% of the assignment marks.

At the start of the group project, you should have established a set of ground rules and ways of working for your group to cover the following points:

• Expected levels of communication including:
  • how often and when people log in to the discussion forum
  • an agreed time frame for responding to contributions.
• Managing the group work including:
  • how you will make decisions as a group
  • whether you want a leader and other managerial roles
  • what strategy you will adopt for coping when people are unavailable
  • contingency plans for dealing with unexpected problems as they arise.
• A schedule to achieve the milestones described in the Block 2 guide.

These need to have been agreed with your group prior to the Christmas break and specified in your project group forum under the thread ‘Q1 Ground rules and group design’. Both of these tasks should be completed by the end of Week 11.

You should copy and paste these ground rules into your TMA answer.

Marks: group (5/10) and individual (5/10).

This question carries 40% of the assignment marks.

The task for this question is to create a prototype of a website for a music festival. The festival is newly created and the organisers are aware that a web presence is essential. However, they have little technical ability so they have turned to your project group to create a website for them. The goal of the website is to provide information about the festival and its events, and to allow the public to communicate with the organisers.

The website should provide a showcase for the festival and should be inviting to potential attendees. Users should be able to navigate the website easily and access all the information they need. You are free to let your collective imagination roam when naming and inventing details about the festival, its events and the on-site facilities. Your festival could be a multi-venue one across a town, or an intensive one taking place on a single site (with many venues); tickets may be for individual events or for the whole festival. It should last for five days (this will be important in question 3). It can be any kind of music, and feel free to incorporate other kinds of events (family shows, talks, workshops etc.) as part of the festival.

Your website must include items from the following list (at least five ideally, but potentially fewer if there is a very good reason agreed with your tutor):

1. a home page that gives general information about the festival, including a photo gallery containing appropriate images of the festival
2. an area where the organisers can give news about the festival, and where visitors can make comments or ask questions
3. a calendar of events taking place as part of the festival, including timing, venues and costs (if tickets are bought for individual events)
4. a facility for the booking of individual festival events, using a web form
5. one or more pages giving details about the performers, music, and other events featured at the festival
6. a page with a map showing the location(s) of the festival, together with details of how to find it by various means of transport
7. details of facilities for the festival, including accommodation and catering options
8. a page with information about the local area, as well as appropriate links to tourist information and the local weather forecast.

Each of the items your group chooses to implement should include some actual content to illustrate how it will be used. For example, the discussion page (item 2) should have some postings and the calendar (item 3) should show a number of events. Your group may also choose to implement additional features to those listed above.

Your group will need to plan the work carefully and allocate different tasks to the various group members. Aim to do this fairly, so that each person is, as far as possible, making an equal contribution. There are various ways your group could allocate tasks: you might choose to allocate pages (or other website elements) to individuals, or for these to be the responsibility of small groups, or for the whole task to be shared. However, each member of the group should be able to identify what their contribution is.

Creating a Prototype Website for a Music Festival

You should plan and discuss your group’s collaborative work in your project group forum, using a thread entitled ‘Q2 WordPress collaboration’. It is preferable to keep the discussion to this single thread, but it is possible that additional threads will be needed or that this thread will become too large. In this case please ensure the titles of additional threads begin with ‘Q2’ so that your tutor can find them easily.

Given the relative simplicity and prototype nature of the website, you are not required to show how ideas from interaction design may have influenced your design. However, raising interaction design issues in your project group forum in a way that helps the development of your design can count as a positive contribution to the collaboration.

• Group marks: website. The group marks allocated for this part of the question are for the overall quality of the group’s website, including:
  • the required features
  • its suitability for the given scenario
  • the completion of the website on time. (5 marks, all group)

• Individual marks: website content. The individual marks allocated for this part of the question are for the website item(s) you contributed to personally. Your tutor will base this mark on the WordPress site and the information provided on the forum. You should describe your contribution to the website in a forum post (up to 200 words) and then copy this message into your TMA answer. (25 marks, all individual)

• Individual marks: collaboration. These marks are for your personal contribution to the group’s collaboration. This will be judged using your contributions to discussions in your project group forum and other information provided on the forum. You should copy messages from the forum into your TMA answer to provide evidence of your contribution. (10 marks, all individual)

This question carries 25% of the assignment marks.

The festival organisers return to your project group with ideas for additional services they would like to offer festival goers, and new interactive features for the festival website. To help them visualise the new features, instead of asking you to program anything in WordPress, they would like you to prototype the new functionality on paper. You should first read the following two items (found in a single document on the module website, entitled ‘TMA 02 Persona and Scenario for Question 3’, in the Assessment  section):

• a persona, representing a particular category of festival goer
• an associated scenario, describing something that such a prospective festival goer might want to carry out using the website.

• As an individual, sketch out a storyboardto show additional functionality for the website you built in Question 2 that will meet the needs of the persona and scenario. No artistic merit is required in the sketching, but make sure to annotate each panel to show the intended interaction clearly. Scan or photograph your storyboard, post it to your project group forum in the thread ‘Q3 storyboards’, and include it in your TMA answer. (Make sure that your scan or photograph has a high enough resolution for all text and annotations to be clearly readable.) (10 marks, all individual)

• As a group, look at the storyboards that your fellow group members have produced. Using these as a starting point, work as a group to design one or more new pages for the website (or modifications to one or more existing pages) to meet the demands of the scenario. Your joint design should be documented as an annotated sketchof one or more web pages. No artistic merit is required in the sketching, but the design should be clear from your joint sketch and annotations. (See the Block 2 guide for advice on producing sketches.)

One member of your group should post the final agreed sketch to your project group forum, together with the URL of the website, in a thread with the title ‘Q3 sketch and website’ plus your group name. You should also individually copy your group’s annotated sketch into your TMA answer. (10 marks, all group)

Individually, write 200–400 words commenting on four aspects of the sketched group design with respect to two or more of the following issues from Part 3 of Block 2:

a. consistent use of familiar users’ conceptual models

b. appropriate use of metaphors

c. short-term memory limitations

d. visual caching

e. recognition versus recall

f. System 1 versus System 2 thinking

g. cognitive load (5 marks, all individual)

This question carries 15% of the assignment marks.

This question asks you to evaluate another group’s work – their website (Question 2) and annotated sketch (Question 3). You will be allocated the completed website and sketch by your tutor. It is likely that this project group will be within your own tutor group, but if other groups have not completed their work on time, your tutor may sometimes allocate you the work of a project group from another tutor.

Evaluate the other group’s work using four out of the ten evaluation heuristics that you will find in Part 5 Section 4 of Block 2:

1. visibility of system status
2. match between system and the real world
3. user control and freedom
4. consistency
5. error prevention
6. recognition rather than recall
7. flexibility and efficiency of use
8. aesthetic and minimalist design
9. help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. help and documentation.

Taking each of your chosen heuristics in turn, write around 125 words on how well the website and/or the annotated sketch meet this heuristic – some heuristics will work better on the website design, some on the annotated sketch.

Once you have completed your evaluation, share it to your tutor-group forum (not project group forum), so that it can be seen by the group whose work you have evaluated. (If you have been asked to evaluate work outside your tutor group, then your tutor will advise of an alternative mechanism.) You should also paste your evaluation into your TMA document.

You should write no more than 500 words for this question. (15 marks, all individual)

This question carries 10% of the assignment marks.

Finally, reflect on your experiences in the group project. As an individual, write around 100 words in response to each of the following questions (i.e. around 200 words in total):

• How well did work in the group go, what has this taught you about online collaboration, and how might it lead you to act differently in the future in online groups? (5 marks, all individual)

• Reflect on the lessons you learnt from carrying out a heuristic evaluation of another group’s work, and from receiving others’ evaluation of your own group’s work. What improvements would you make to the design of your group’s website and annotated sketch (explaining why they would be improvements)? (5 marks, all individual)