For this capstone writing course, we were asked to put together a team of 3 or 4 classmates in which we would design materials that could be used for user-testing and then make a report about whatever we are testing. My group has four people, and we plan to analyze three different website-building tools: Wix, Weebly, and WordPress–the three "w's" of amateur website building. Each member is responsible for learning about one of the aforementioned website-building tools and the fourth member is responsible for bringing in information about website building in general. This is an especially important piece because the fourth member's general knowledge will help us other three members to have a standard to compare our respective sites to, rather than simply comparing three tools to each other. In other words, the general knowledge and research for website-building tools gives context to what the other three of us (who are analyzing specific sites) should look for.
For the user-test design component of the project, one of our members already conducted a study with users. There are some high achievers in this group and this person is certainly one of them. Because this person already conducted a user study of Wix, we can use the same format for a proposed study about Weebly and WordPress. Having one script and test that is used for each website will help us in the overall goal of our assignment, which is to compare the three applications. We are well set up because we now have two baselines, the general website building tools information and the same test design. While we complete this project, we will be looking for any necessary adaptions that need to be made to the test design, but for now, we are positioned for success.
The interesting aspect of the team, in my opinion, is the size. Perhaps in the "real world" that we say we are working toward, teams can have more people, a person for each job–but there is a more important skill involved here, and that is the ability to have multiple jobs. Let's face it, we're all about to try to get jobs in a world in which, for the most part, being the newbie in the workforce means you have to catch up. Being multi-faceted in our abilities and being able to play multiple roles (and multiple roles simultaneously) in the workforce will determine the rate in which we find our niche in our future careers. Whereas it might be convenient as well as traditional for each person in an academic role to have one job, the real value in this project is that we have to put on a few different hats to complete the project. We are analysts, test-designers, researchers, readers, and editors.
And of course, as any capstone project should, it ties into the main theme of the class, user design and experience architecture. On a more obvious level, we are analyzing the design (and architecture) of these website-building tools. Under that, though, there is a deeper learning about experience architecture–the kind of minds and thinking that it takes to understand and to build it well. As we learn to use multiple skills and play multiple roles in our groups, we ingrain in ourselves that it takes multi-faceted thinking in order to design, build, critique, and change designs to give users the best iteration of a user-centered design until the next iteration is discovered.
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