Overview

For this project, you will construct a simple Web site. It should provide visitors information on a topic of your choosing. An example topic might be a hobby, tips for new students, a guide to products (e.g. computers, video games, cell phones), local stores (e.g. clothes, shoes, music), restaurants (e.g. pizza, ethnic), or anything for which you would have an interested audience. Keep in mind that your final site should have roughly 6 to 12 pages. The content of the site must be your original work and not copied from other media.

User-Centered Design

1. General Concept. With one or two sentences, briefly indicate the topic and general goal of your Web site.
2. User and task analysis. At this stage, you learn about your users and what they would like to accomplish at your site. Ideally, this process involves interviewing and observing users. For large, well developed sites, a series of interviews, surveys, observations and other inquiries may take weeks or even months. For this project, however, you should at least talk to one or two potential users to get some ideas what they would find useful. With this information, provide a few paragraphs describing your users, their goals and what they would like to accomplish with your site.
3. Conceptual design. Often called the information architecture, sketch out how the content of the site will be organized across several Web pages. At this point, you will list what will appear on each page but not how it will appear visually. Usually this information is specified as a graph indicating what content is on each page and how the pages are linked.
4. Low-fidelity designs. For this stage, you start specifying how each page appears. Many choose to create paper and pencil drawings because they are quick and easy to create and allow for many fast changes. Some Web designers test their ideas by showing their designs to potential users and asking them how they would perform core tasks. For your project, create some page designs with paper and pencil and use them as a starting point for creating your Web site. Either include these low-fidelity designs in your design document or describe what you did. As you design your pages, consider the following principles:
   • Maintain a consistent layout and style across your pages.
   • For each page, consider what you want your user to first see. Use visual variables such as size and font style to draw the user's attention to the most important elements first. You will also want to consider color and motion if you later decide to add them.
   • Decide what elements should be grouped on a page. Use placement and similar heading styles to show the user which elements are thematically grouped.
5. Detailed designs. At this point, you may start coding with HTML. Style sheets are useful to ensure that all logically related material is presented with the same visual style.
6. Evaluation. Either with your drawings or your HTML pages, you should "test" your design to see if users would have any difficulty with your site. Perform a simplified usability test with the following goals:
   • Can the user identify the main point of the site? Show your main page to potential users and ask them to explain to you their expectations of what the site would provide them.
   • Can users find critical information in the site?Ask some potential users to look up some critical information in the site. See if they successfully identify and select the right links to find it.

   Document what happened during your tests and describe any changes you made to your design.

Requirements

You may do this project with 1 or 2 additional people in the class. You may also complete this project individually. Follow the user-centered design process above. In addition, you must create and use an external style sheet for the Web site in order to give it a consistent visual design from page to page.

Document your design process using a word processor such as Word.

The use of javascript is not required for this assignment.

Deliverables

Using the COL submission, tell me the URL of your main page. Also submit the document that notes your user-centered design process (2-3 pages).

If you completed this project with other students, only one person needs to submit, but you should note who contributed to the project in the design document.