Forming Groups / Blogs

User Research
Each group, conduct 4-5 interviews, contextual interviews or survey. Can use Surveymonkey, send emails, etc. Contact group that may fit this persona. Purpose: How do people that may fit this persona use the web, make decisions - what would change their behavior?; what sites do they like?; what are their pet peeves? We will do some form of Participatory Research in class.
Competitor Analysis
Each group will find a unique site to analyze. Purpose: How are competitors addressing this? What are differentiators? What are they doing well, what are they not? See 10 Heuristics as a benchmark (will discuss in class). For this portion, COPY all [3] of your blog posts for your As-Is Analyses and create a written paragraph as a consensus as well - Overall findings and group summary for competitor analysis that compare the three and might differentiate how yours will be different.
Personas
Each group will develop a primary and a secondary persona Personas need to be believable, based on their observations/data, and different from each other. They should have a photo, quote, bullets of attributes, and small narrative. Personas: The foundation of a great user experience

You will post summary of all on your own team blog. You will present these to "the client" on Tuesday, February 4.
For Thursday 1/16 post a detailed Research Plan on your team blog. FIRST you must include the top 3 goals of your business/idea. Include how you are going to conduct the research, as well as a preliminary outline about what your business problem is and what your site does and how you arrived at the agreed-upon business idea, as well as a preliminary idea about other potential competitors, and who your site's target audience may be.

Goals and strategies for developing a Project Charter (from the reading):

What is the mission of your organization?
How will creating this web site support your mission?
What are the two or three most important goals for the site?
Who is the primary audience for the web site?
What do you want the audience to think or do after having visited your site?
What web-related strategies will you use to achieve those goals?
How will you adequately maintain the finished site?

Assigned Groups are:

Don't freak out, but the content deliverables for the scope of this group project will be:

Charter
Research & Competitive Analysis
Personas
Wireframes
Clickable Prototypes of the wireframe
Usability Testing Plan & Scripts
Analysis
"Functional" Clickable Prototype
All of this will be documented on your blog; with Mid-Year and Final Presentations

DESIGN 5405 - Web Communications