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.