Work Completed and Learning Outcomes

            Read through the unit one course material, taking notes of important information as well as the expected learning outcomes of the module. I found Ben Hunt’s article on personas and scenarios to be very informative. I went on to review the reflections and work of other students in unit one to formulate ideas on the best way to proceed. Investigating sites with similar purposes to mine, like yoyogames.com, miniclip.com, and gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com really helped me to start to envision my website.

            After all of my research, I proceeded created a design document containing all of the necessary content including: websites purpose, a site map, mock-ups of unique pages, as well as scenarios and personas of potential visitors.

Rationale for What Has Been Done

            Through my reading of the Unit One documents I explicitly followed its directions at every step, making sure that I did not miss any important information or learning outcomes.

The Good and The Bad

            I found this unit to be very helpful in planning out my website. This was the first time that I have been exposed to personas and scenarios as a design tool. While working through scenarios I thought of few new features for the site including:

• Mission statement above naviation menu
• Help link in the sections page to ask questions to the administrator
• Error report link on the game page to send to the administrator
• Instructions for the games on the site
• A high score table if possible
• Header in the tutorial page to give context to visitors that ended up directly on that page

            At first I thought that the process of scenarios and personas was tedious and had little benefit, but after working through the process I realized that it is a powerful design tool that can be extended to much more than just websites.

What I would Have Done Differently

            Personally, I believe that I went through the content in a fairly organized fashion, accomplishing all of the necessary outcomes in a time efficient manner. Perhaps I would have changed my initial attitude toward the personas and scenarios though.

Completed Site Design Documentation