Case Study

•  You will be part of a group working on a Case Study together. The group will be expected to complete the Case Study, partly in class, and partly between the two classes.

Project

• As a project, choose a website that you would like to build soon. This can be something for a class, a personal site, a site for a small business, or something else entirely. Write one or two sentences explaining what the site is about.
  [Note: many of the pages here assume that you will be doing an instructional website, since this is a College of Education workshop. The same steps in this process are useful for other types of sites as well, however, so you may choose something else. Talk with the instructor or email aingram@kent.edu if you have questions.]
   
• Write two Use Scenarios for the website. There is a basic use scenario on the website that we discussed as an example. Each  scenario should do the following:
  • Describe a specific user who represents one of the major types of users who might use the site (such as a student, a parent, a coworker, a customer, whatever). To do this, imagine a real person who is one of those categories but who is also complex and human. (One paragraph)
  • Describe the environment in which this user is working (home, school, work, etc.). Again, imagine what that specific person is doing there. (One paragraph)
  • Describe a typical task or set of tasks that this user completes on the website Will they search for information? Will they find an assignment? Will they communicate with other students? Will they buy a product? Something else (One paragraph)
  • Describe step-by-step how this user will accomplish this task. For example, to use the search feature of the website, John will go to the site, locate the search box, enter a search term, click the search button, review the search results. If there are several big tasks that this type of user might do, then you will want to describe them. (One paragraph or list per task)
     
• Write a description of the goals, audience, and context of the website, including
  • Goals for the website (is it educational, is it for personal use, is it departmental) Specifically, what will your users want to accomplish on the site?
  • Who is your audience? Make sure to include information about their technological sophistication, prior knowledge, and ability to learn
  • What is important about the context (development, technology, learning) for the website design?
     
• Layout the structure of your website. Create a visual representation of how your site will be structured, showing links to and from the homepage to other pages, making sure to show all the pages in your site. This can be done in Microsoft Word, MS Powerpoint, Inspiration, or SmartDraw.
   
• Draw storyboards (or "mockups") of the home page and one other page in the website, showing layout and navigation. You should use a drawing program, or something like Powerpoint to create your storyboards. In these drawings you will show how the pages will look, including color scheme, layout of info and graphics, navigational links, and any other features the pages will have. This is just a mock up. I do NOT expect the links to work or the drawing to be functional like a real webpage.

The complete project will be due one week after the end of the workshop.