Milestone 2: The end...of mockups

Milestone 2 is here and the end of making mockups is near. This past week the Design group has been refining our old mockups from previous weeks to ensure that they are all cohesive. I changed the goals section to fit the requirements and I took out the user mockups for the period before the competition because even though it said in the Wiki that there might be curious students, our group felt that this was a bad idea to include these mockups. We also took out the billboard tab because it will not be in the actual website. The billboard mockups are in a separate window now and are not embedded in the Kukui Cup website.

Although it seems as if refining mockups would be easy, it became very time consuming because of the number of pages the user mockups have. One small change requires changing all 19 mockups. I then had to go back and make sure the mockups for each time period matched so that the look of the website didn't change every week.

Wiki: link

Mockups and Prizes

Continuing with our mockups we are now in the middle of the competition phase. I created the mockups for the user pages again and it is pretty similar to the previous mockups. The only big change included is the content such as different events going on during the competition and the amount of Kukui Nuts the user "Maile" has acquired. I also added more information to the profile pane because it was a little plain.

In addition to these mockups I came up with a list of prizes for the competition with the proposed budget of $2000. At first I thought that this was a lot of money and we could afford to give out many prizes because of it. However, after looking up prices and calculated the costs in a spreadsheet it actually took me a while before I could create a list of prizes that fit into this budget. What made it difficult was that if we gave individual prizes, that is about 22-24 people per floor which would come out to 44-48 people in total because of two dorm towers and that is for only one round. I tried to come up with group prizes such as an ice cream party that not only provided an incentive, food, but also a kind of social aspect with a group celebration. After all, those who win that prize would have had to pull in a team effort to win. I also created a prize for active participation, meaning that anyone who has the minimum number of Kukui Nuts (determined by an admin) has a chance to win the prize. That person is chosen at random at the end of the competition and the purpose of this prize is to give everyone who participates an equal chance of winning something. So even if you don't have many Kukui Nuts or your floor is not "gung-ho" about the competition, you still have an incentive to participate.

• Lowest EC Score for Dorm (final round): 32" energy star HDTV for the lounge
• Lowest EC Score for Floor (final round): $10 iTunes gift card per person
• Highest KN score, Individual (1st-3rd rounds): $5 Jamba Juice gift certificate, one winner per floor for the each of the 3 rounds.
  
• Highest KN score, Individual (final round): 4th generation iPod Nano for one winner per dorm
  
• Highest KN score, Floor (final round): ice cream sundae party for the winning floor
• Highest KN score, Dorm(final round): pizza party for the winning dorm
  
• Active participation through min KN score, Individual(final round): 3rd generation iPod touch

Wiki: link

Mockups and more mockups

This week we moved on to the next time period of the Kukui Cup competition. It is supposed to be the first day of the competition and I created the mockups for the user pages. Because of the amount of content and links on these pages I created a total of 19 mockups. It is getting a little easier to create these mockups because of all of the practice. I can easily get into the mindset of what time period in the competition it is and think of the things a user would see.

Last week I created mockups for the user before the competition. Originally I had discussed with other team members that the user should not be able to log into the competition before it starts because the pages would not be complete with information and thus be an inaccurate representation of what it actually would look like during the competition. However, it was stated in the wiki that this page would be for "curious" students so I created them anyways.

The group will be discussing these logistics of the website in the coming week and start working on the next mockups.

Here is a link to this weeks mockups: link

Step by step

After the initial milestone we realized that we had to break down the mockups into different time periods within the competition and focus on one every week. This allowed us to focus with one frame of mind and put more thought and detail into the mockups. This week we completed mockups for the period one month before the competition.

I was in charge of the user page and I was so focused on making mockups that I completely forgot that it was supposed to be before the competition and the user shouldn't be able to log in. At least I have a head start on the "during the competition" phase. I made a list of example events, activities, and commitments to put in the mockups as well as to give the Kukui Cup administrators content they could use. I got a lot of ideas from other dorm competitions as well as local energy related groups websites such as Kanu Hawaii. I also updated the home page mockup to provide mockups for every link on the page.

This coming week we are moving to another time period and a new set of mockups. I hope we can also review last weeks mockups and make sure that it is cohesive.

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.

Kukui Cup Competition: A milestone is near

Contribution
Over the past week the Design Group has broken off into two groups to work on mockups for the competition website. I worked with Scott and John and we came up with a two site design where there is a public section that is a general energy information site and a competition site for students involved in the competition. I really enjoyed working in these smaller groups because it was more flexible and easier to propose new ideas. The hour meeting we had passed by in a flash. Here are our mockups.

The first milestone of our Kukui Cup Competition Design is in one week and our team is coming to grips with what we will have at this deadline. Since the project is so broad with many different aspects of the competition to work on, each member of our group was assigned to a task.

I am in charge of the Focus Group. We need to meet with the Resident Advisers to get their opinion about the competition and get a better perspective on the students, the dorms, and the dorm meetings. I created a wiki page listing the aspects we need to cover in the meeting, the questions to ask, and different ways of presenting the information and questions.

Milestone
I will be meeting with Shannah who has experience holding focus groups to get a better understanding of how they are run. By the first milestone I will hope to have a concrete list of topics, questions, and ways of presenting all of this at the meeting with the RAs. I will also be presenting our final mockups that Anthony and Scott creates (whichever design we choose), energy literacy information that John creates, and the charts/graphs that will display the energy information which Wing will create. I will also be helping my teammates in any way they help (most likely John and Scott since we already broke up into that team) since this a team effort.

Kukui Cup Competition: Brainstorm

After researching about other dorm energy competitions, the Kukui Cup Competition Design group held our first team meeting where we discussed the content of the design and engaged in some brainstorming. I realized that there is a lot more work involved in this project than I had originally thought and there are many things we still need to get straightened out. We talked mostly about the content of the system but we did not get to the use cases yet. We also talked about the prizes that would be given out as incentive during the competition but without knowing how our budget is going to look, we could not make concrete decisions.

A couple days ago I emailed Balsamiq about our competition project and they were kind enough to let me use a license for this project for free! I love supporting companies that I feel have good products as well as good ethics. If I ever have to use products in the future I will be sure to purchase it from Balsamiq because I like their philanthropic spirit, as one commentator put it. Here is their company blog about donating their software: link. Hopefully by next week I can already have initial mockups using the Balsamiq software.