Kukui Cup Competition Design: Week 6

For this week, we made mockups for the time when the competition has just started. Judging from what we had done the past week, I think that it is very helpful to focus on one time period at a time. It easy easy for us to concentrate on the needs that the student's have based on the time. This week we continued working on the pages that we have worked on in the past. For me, that would be the billboard page and the help page.



The help page didn't change very much. I just added a little more information that should have been in the previous page.



This is one of the screens of the billboard page. It is a basic page which would include much of the information that a student would like to know at a glance. It has the current date at the top of the page. On thee right there are tips so that they improve their scores. In the middle there is a slideshow and the current rankings, which is probably the most important information to the students. On the right are upcoming events which the students may be interested in going to earn Kukui Nuts.

Kukui Cup Competition Design: Week 5

After the first milestone, we are taking a different approach to creating the mockups for the website. We will now be focusing on a different time period on the competition time line each week. We will create the pages with the appropriate content for each time period. This method will allow us to focus on a certain time period so we stay in the same mindset as we design each page for the time. It will help us to be more consistent and focus on exactly what should and shouldn't be on each of the pages. we will utilize our 2nd meetings each week to collaborate on our pages and make the necessary changes.

I made the mockups for the billboard page and the help page.



The billboard page is a page that is displayed on a large screen somewhere where there is a lot of foot traffic. People would be able to track the competition without needing to log in to the site. It will show relevant information depending on the time of the competition.



The help page just displays more information about the site and the Kukui Cup Competion.


View the wiki page with more information of the pages here.

Kukui Cup Competition Design: Milestone 1

This is the first milestone of the Kukui Cup Competition Design team. These past four weeks have definitely been a learning experience and being on the design team has enlightened me as to what the task entails. The most difficult thing that me and my team have had to adjust to was not having set tasks in order to meet an objective. There are many ways to reach the goals that are provided and it is up to us to stay on track to meet them. Now that the milestone is here, we are able to show a finished mockup of what we believe the site should look like after careful decisions were made about each portion of the site.

During the meeting on Friday, we really hashed out every aspect of the site and what needed to be there and what didn't need to be there. We decided to go with the single site design instead of the double site design in order to simplify for the milestone. We were able to cut down the number of pages and the number of modules on each page. For example, instead of having a page where the user can quickly see the current data on a login page, we decided it would be more useful and even quicker to have that same data on the home page. That way, we cut out the "logged out" page and made the experience much better for the user.

Much of my time this week was used to clean up the mockups that I have made previously and to create new ones to replace them. For the previous ones, I changed them to add actual content to make them look much closer to what they would look like if they were actually implemented. This was much more useful than I could have thought because actually seeing the site fleshed out like that actually helped me see what was effective and what was not in the pages. While it is quick to physically make the mockups, it is much harder to make the decisions that go into making a mockup. Many times, I would have to go back and forth on a feature or try different things when moving things around to make them aesthetically pleasing.

The two pages:




merged into one:


For the next milestone, much of the work comes in exploring other options. The first task we have is to refine what we have. We have done a lot of work trying to make the site as good as we can, but there are undoubtedly things that will come up as other teams try to implement the site. These may be things like aesthetics, but could also be things such as a module just not making sense to be in there. Since we have worked on the design for a while, there may be things that we may have set our minds to that may not actually be the best implementation. Outside of modifying what we already have, we may pursue the idea of having the two site design. If we could really flesh that out we could easily see what the major differences are between the two methodologies and may even decide to switch designs. Outside of the design aspect, we need to create more content for the site. This would include things like adding more activities, commitments, and goals, and also creating content of our own that would aid in increasing energy literacy. These could be in the form of videos, tips to succeed in the competition, and creating quizzes for the students.

The wiki of our milestone 1 can be found: here.

Kukui Cup Competition Design: Week III

In this third week of the project, I began creating mock-ups of the website. Me and Wing came up with a prototype design of a home page which would have a competition module that could be swapped in a out depending on whether there was a Kukui Cup being held. We used Balsamiq to do this create the mock-up. I also went with the old paper and pencil in my notebook to do a few more designs of this idea of a competition module. The drawings can be seen below. I apologize for the quality of the scans. Hopefully, I will be able to make them more clear later.








After that design, I moved onto another design which would have the competition module always be available, but its content would change depending on if it was before, during, or after the competition. These mock-ups were done in Balsamiq. This wiki page includes all of my mock-ups and an explanation of each page. Click here

During our meeting on Friday, we discussed activities which students could do to earn Kukui Nuts, different visualizations of the data, and questions that needed to be asked during the focus groups with the RAs.

For the next week and the milestone, we hope to choose one of the two designs proposed in this blog entry or another design which separates the main page and the Kukui Cup page. From there, we will be able to create a more polished and finalized version of the site for the first milestone.