Empty Nest Syndrome: Saying goodbye to Tracy

Hey you.

Tracy is about a month old now. I swear she grows kilobytes by the day. We are proud, tearful mothers of our final product.

Since we last updated you, we reworked the mockup demo to make it appear more cohesive. Previously, we had different designs for different mockups, which can confuse the user when familiarizing where certain buttons are. We standardized the fonts and graphics through all the graphics.

We showcased our mockups to our capstone class, and they responded positively! It seemed like they understood our vision, which was encouraging as we worked towards our final deadlines.

We had a meeting with a focus group made up of reporters from both The San Antonio Express News and the Houston Chronicle. This group was incredibly useful to our final product. Many of the features on the site seemed to be useful to them. They also wanted to ensure that there were privacy features to only share with people who are collaborating on the project, not the whole newsroom. We compiled the feedback into a document and got to work implementing them. Meanwhile, Ally shared their current spreadsheet which tracks the request to implement the columns into the categorizations on the site, including the file size and type of data sets. This was useful to us to see exactly what the newsroom is currently lacking and how our database could potentially fill in the holes.

After we implemented the feedback, we transferred the Canva powerpoint to Invision. We uploaded the images of the Canva page mockups and added hotspots to the button areas. The pages missed necessary links that would connect the pages together. The functionality is limited to just the clickthrough of the portal. We can not input anything on the site right now, but what we have right now is sufficient for our final mock up.

We worked through a marketing plan to leave behind with our child, Tracy. Since this is an internal tool, we focused on making the portal easy, accessible and relevant to members of the newsroom. We decided to opt for tools such as a Slackbot to hopefully encourage use of the portal. We created a user guide that walks any user through the functions of the portal. We also created an About page to help users understand the importance of utilizing the portal. Lastly, we created a survey that allows for anonymous feedback of any users who choose to leave some. We hope that these tools will keep Tracy alive and healthy in years to come.

Today is our last day of class, but the first day of Tracy’s journey. Now, it is up to the team at Hearst media to create the database based on our mockup and link it to a data server. We hope that one day we can see Tracy blossom into a fully developed database.

Until then, thank you for joining us on this ride.

Signing off,

Kenny, Jimena, Laura, Areeba and Tracy