A Rogue Website Pivot
Projects are never linear, there are ups, downs, left turns, rights turns, and sometimes at the tip of a hat, there’s a pivot.
At the beginning of my sophomore year at Utah Valley University (UVU), I was required to take DGM 2240, a course that implemented a service learning project. This course had a lot of firsts for me. It was the first class that I didn’t get to choose the people that I worked with, the first time I worked with a real stakeholder, and the first time I had to pivot in a project.
Introducing The Rogue Website
Meeting our stakeholder for the first time was… interesting. He was excited to begin his project, an undertaking that he had been trying to get rolling for years and had had high aspirations that our sophomore-filled class could accomplish. Our stakeholder was a Professor from the Digital Cinema program at UVU and his goal was to build a website that helped showcase the program in the hopes that it would help lure more people to the degree; an idea born from the frustration of school guidelines that hinder creativity and impaire visually appealing degrees. Needless to say, the pressure was on.
“Make it polished! Make it beautiful!”
Our stakeholder intended to create a rogue website, something he openly admitted that he did not have permission to make. He wanted to introduce the site to UVU as a better way to to entice prospective students to join. Outside the constraints of the university’s guidelines he could really highlight what the program was accomplishing, showcase students, and introduce the curriculum to curious minds. He wanted it clean, informative, artistically beautiful, and polished.
Research and Planning
In the field of UX design we are constantly reminded that, “you are not your audience.” But in this case we kind of were; which really hindered my group because of our bias. We were college students that were in a digital media program and we already had an idea of what college students wanted because that’s who we were (my first hard lesson in taking myself out of the equation when beginning project research).
To begin our research, we began with a survey consisting of roughly two to three good UX questions. The rest of them had to do with UI influences and questions we already had answers to. (Read my take away here).
Once we had asked better questions to our audience through a second survey, checked out other cinema websites, created wireframes/surface comps and had had lots of class discussions/critiques, I was able to create a basic Project Brief to present our findings to our stakeholder.
Rogue One Down — Time to Pivot
Our next stakeholder meeting, the purpose of which was to present our findings and discuss website planning, was anything but pleasant. Someone had spoken about our rogue website to a non-involved third-party and the project had been shut down by the university. To this day the details are still unclear, the scolding was excruciating, and the next hour of presenting to someone that didn’t want to listen to what we had to say was long and awkward.
“I don’t even know why I’m here; it’s a waste of my time.”
In the days that followed, we had to come up with a solution to our problems. UVU did not want this site to happen and our stakeholder clearly didn’t want to work with us. We needed to wow them both. There were good ideas on how to master this, but all of them came with different restrictions and complications. Some of the proposed solutions and their drawbacks were as follows:
Social Media Site —
It had been done. A lot. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Behance, YouTube, etc. Who would manage the site and post content?
Blog —
Blogs take time and consistent posting for them to become popular or followed. Who would write the blog and keep it up to date with UVU Digital Cinema?
A Club Site —
Something that would cater to alumni and interested film makers. This idea defeated the purpose of gaining potential prospects to the degree program.
Proposing A New Plan
After a few days of going back and forth with these new ideas, it occurred to me that, instead of starting from scratch, we revert back to and continue with our original idea of building a website to attract students to the program. With this new approach, we resolved to expand our plan to include other schools in the area that offer film degrees instead of focusing and creating a stand alone website. This way we could do a comparison chart of what each school had to offer, what their enrollment status was, what the cost of tuition was, the different levels of degrees offered, and the ratings of each school. I then reviewed my notes from the stakeholder interview to see if we could pull anything from them. One thing that stuck out to me was a mention about the depth of the careers that Digital Cinema offered, something that I figured we could use. After all, what better way to draw in the masses then to inform them of the variety of job opportunities and a future potential salary?
This new website would include three of the main schools in Utah at first, with an option of adding more schools to the site later. The landing page would show a comparison chart of each school, highlighting the basics: enrollment, tuition costs, degree options (specifically for the DGM film degrees) and location. A person could then look at the schools more in-depth, exploring projects, viewing awards, learning about the faculty, and getting in touch with the right advisors. We then added a career section with descriptions of the jobs and the average salary of the position. Finally, we added an optional blog for the latest in digital cinema news, something our stakeholder had mentioned.
Unfortunately I did not get to see the project through to its final stages due to time constraints that made the site impossible to finish. It did get passed onto the next semesters class and I was happy to see that some of the ideas I had suggested went on to be implemented in the final design. The experience overall was positive and it was a good collaboration of the entire class’ efforts.
Shelly Gardner is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to a Service Learning Project: UVU Digital Cinema in the DGM 2240 and representative of the skills learned.
