Team 2 : Let's get digital

By Anonymous 16:25 joining the data, team 2

During our first stages a majority of our concept focused around the kits. We knew we wanted to included an online interaction too and started to talk about who we were designing for and what would they want.

After revisiting our activities (you can read more about in Yana's blog Air Kits) and listening to teachers about what was effective in the classroom we decided we needed a number of different profiles, community, teacher and student. This was our first starting point and we created quick site maps to help understand content and flows.

Version 1.0 sitemap

Drawing out the site map and rethinking our persona we decided that there were way too many log in's and remembering another password might be a barrier to engagement. We did not want to add any extra work for Karen as she is busy and currently not engaged with air quality. This resulted in just one log in for the teacher while the rest of the community and the students will have a sub set of the teacher content available to them.

We created goals for the site to help set the tone and understand what we wanted to achieved.

I am clean and simple
If I am used in a classroom many can see me at once even if a group is gathered around a laptop
I can be used on a projector or smart board
My colour palette is refined, minimum with pops of colour
Calls to action are limited per page, no confusion please!
The students are the stars of the show, the focus is them

We iterated on the sitemap and considered where EPA could be used and how to include citizen science data. Once a sitemap was loosely defined we then started to make rough sketches considering the content, layout, context and user goals. We made notes beside sketches on possible interactions and what were primary actions vs secondary.

We also wanted to ensure the online experience and the offline (physical kits) felt contented and helped with the learning and sense making of the data. Using elements from the kits we created a digital representation so there would be familiarity and used it as a tool to introduce other elements about air quality like the EPA stations and data.

considering users with sitemaps

sketching to understand flows and interactions

After receiving feedback it confirmed our thoughts on the direction we wanted to go, an open site for Karen and the community that would include a map showing areas being monitored by the EPA or the students, a page to view the the work and documentation by the students, a page with helpful homework resources and a page about the program.

The teacher view included additional pages or extra content on the community pages. Items from the teacher view could be shared onto the community view or kept private for just the class.

After deciding the flows and how the site would scale with additional streams of water, soil and waste (you can read a bit about the streams on Joes blog) along with considering the features that may need to be applied as it grows we picked the key pages to develop further for Fridays presentation.

Ideally, and what we really needed to do,was to move the sketches into axure or another wire framing tool to work out all the parts in greater detail but due to time restrictions we jumped into high-fi's in photoshop and created the interactions in keynote. Here is just one example of a page and the interactions we considered.