The first milestone is here!

Kukui Cup Competition

Getting to this first milestone in the Kukui Cup Competition Design project has been a new experience for me. Usually projects are handed to me with exact specifications for what needs to be done. The professor calls the shots and all you have to do is what the instructions say. However, in this project it was very broad and open ended. Instead of coding, we were the ones designing the the competition and website. At first I thought it would be really easy since I would essentially be the one giving the instructions to the Tech Team on what to create and there were little restrictions on my design. Now that the first milestone is over I realized how hard it is to be on the other side of the project.

In the beginning there was a lot of confusion as to who was doing what. There were no clear tasks assigned and I was unsure of what my role was. At first I thought we were given free reign of the design of the competition but was soon at an impass when we were given a very detailed explanation of the requirements of the competition by our professor. Normally what the professor says are instructions set in stone and you have to follow them. This made it difficult because they were just suggestions and were supposed to guide us when we instead took them as requirements.

Contributions

I worked on the focus group where I talked with members of my group to come up with questions we need to ask in our meeting with the RAs. There were many things we did not know about the dorms, the students that lived in them, and the RAs duties in the dorms. Since I got a lot of input from my teammates I was able to create a wiki page with my finding fairly quickly. I then helped my teammates with their tasks which in a sense helped my focus group task because it ensured that we had something appropriate to show the RAs in the meeting. I noticed Wing was having some trouble coming up with graphs so I told him I would create some graphs as well to add to his collection of graphs he already made. Towards the end of the project we decided to split the website up into sections and everyone took part in a section except for Wing who was in charge of making graphs for the website. After everyone completed their part Scott, John, and I put the pages together. Scott and I then created a user story to simulate how a user would go use the site.


The Next Episode
For the next milestone I would like to see the design of the website finalized to show the RAs at the focus group. The input given by the RAs should be taken into account and a new mockup made using the information obtained. I would also like for a more concrete list of activities and commitments made.