Designing a Process Board

Before you begin designing your board, you need to figure out the Problem/Need you are trying to solve or fill.

NEED

The purpose of this website is to give students information about the Digital Cinema Programs available in Utah.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

The UVU Digital Cinema website currently does not generate enough traffic and does not show the potential that the UVU Digital Cinema department has.

You then need to come up with a goal

VALUE PROPOSITION

We intended to make the website landing page pop with color, creation, and wonder. Students should be able to locate each school in Utah (we chose 3 for the first version) and the corresponding tuition cost, professor information, and reviews.

VISION STATEMENT

A website is an important part of the decision-making process for future students looking to join a university. Because of this, it is crucial that the university program stands out from the crowd. The vision of this website project is to create a compelling, professional and interactive website that both excites and informs future students through reviews about Utah’s Digital Cinema programs.

After that, you need to go through the “planning and discover stage” and come up with a walkthrough and site map

ASSUMPTIONS

We started with some assumptions to help us narrow down the audience we were looking for. These also helped us determine what needed to be included on the site.

PLANNING

Because of the hiccup in our project, we had to rearrange a few things and come up with some new ideas. We did a walk-through process board to clearly state our goal of the site and to walk through what a potential user would do when visiting the site. We also created a site map to guide us as we came up with page names and navigation.

WALKTHROUGH

We went through the process Josh would take beginning with when he arrives at the site and ending up with Josh getting information about UVU’s Digital Cinema program through UVU’s website (see left).

Research is an important step of planning your process and is often time left out.

WHAT WE FOUND

Our research started with planning and discovery, which I included in the section above. This section shows the results from the survey we sent out, and the personas we created based on the information we received from the planning and discovery phase. We included the needs and goals from each persona to more accurately help us fulfill those requirements in our design.

USER TESTING SCENARIOS

https://www.usertesting.com/v/373010d7-c5d8-4faf-967a-e3e3bc220758#!/notes

https://www.usertesting.com/v/85ef52fa-b689-4cd0-8b97-e376fedf60ff#!/notes

I submitted the prototype to Invision to receive feedback from real users. It was interesting to see what they said and it was really helpful to get unbiased opinions on how user-friendly the site would be. If we were to continue with this project, I would take the feedback from the users and possibly get some more feedback from others and then change things accordingly.

FEEDBACK FROM MAN

The man that reviewed the app said, “If i’m in Utah this is great; but this says it’s the holy grail of digital cinema and it’s only giving me info about the top three universities in Utah, I would want to know where that credibility comes from”

He also gave an interesting nugget of information that I found really helpful. He said, “I would also like to see a 5 star rating on the front page where it lists the different schools”.

FEEDBACK FROM WOMAN

The woman who reviewed our site had some good feedback regarding the design of the site. She said “everything works really well… it’s really easy to use and it didn’t take me long to figure it out.” “It’s really nice, really easy to interact with, and it also looks nice.” She did mention that we should fix the menu to be more well-designed and I agree with that.

After you have received feedback, you want to narrow down the design elements you want to focus on.

OUR TOP 5

• Clean Keep it simple. The site should look clean and professional, with few distractions.
• Hick’s Law: The fewer options, the faster it takes to make a decision (less information is more. We want a few links with a call to action)
• Aesthetic-Usability Effect: It needs to be user friendly and easy to navigate.
• Hierarchy: Student and parents must understand how to quickly navigate the site and find the information that is most important.
• Emphasis: We used the color red to create emphasis.

Once this is done, you can start creating wireframes, surface comps, and eventually prototypes.

Chelsa MacKay Anderton is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The previous article relates to Designing a Process Board in the DGM 2240 Course and is representative of the skills learned.