How to Suck a Lemon

The end is insight yet with it comes the bittersweet experience of relief tainted with overtones of anxiety and stress! Although I feel my website is pretty much complete the more I test the more I want to tweek and the longer my to-do list becomes! Looking back I have to say I feel I’ve come a long way since my first decidedly dodgy page designs. It has been a rather queer experience into the unknown, rather bitter at times but now fairly refreshing. I’m sure I will look back with a wry grin at what will seem a very amateurish website but right now I’m quite proud of how it’s turned out. The rest of this week will be dedicated to collating my useabilty testing to form an evaluation based on the project goals. Equally I’m sure the feedback form will require much tweeking as I have been still unable to upload the now version due to Internet connection problems.

Today has been dedicated to perfecting my presentation and tidying up sketchbooks as I was unable to complete the times task from home because of a medieval Internet connection. This has been rather frustrating as I feel I had performed well in the tasks up until now. Equally I feel it will put at somewhat of an disadvantage next week, still, some things can’t be helped.


Targets

• Ensure consistency between pages
• Do final validation checks
• Collate useabilty testing to form an evaluation based on my project goals
• Rehearse presentation
• Live and breathe sketch books

Flow

Fortunately for me this week has turned out to be somewhat of a revelation as to what I was expecting. Monday morning, as usual, did not bring about the joy of a new day but more a dread of what was to come. The half term was not as productive as I had liked and I felt the control I had initially gained over A5 and A6 was now slipping away. A5 in particular was weighing on my mind as although I’d managed to get most of the site together, I didn’t understand a word of the errors coming up in validation checks and I hadn’t even tried setting up the feedback form. What made things worse was everyone else seemed to be flying along with the greatest of ease!So after reluctantly uploading as much of the website I had completed on Sunday I prepared for the worst…

After horrific driving conditions I finally arrived at college but the testing was already underway. This didn’t help in improving my mood and now gloomy vision of what was to come. However, during a quick talk with Steve most of the group took the trouble to review my site and provide some valuable feedback, thanks to those involved! I started to feel better about the situation and knew the only way to overcome the mountain of work before me was to just get on with it and that’s exactly what I did.

I have to say I think most of the problem was psychological because I felt I simply didn’t have the knowledge to overcome the problems I was facing. The challenge seemed far too high and working from home over the past two weeks had made me feel very isolated.

Csikszentmihalyi [a famous psychologist] shows exactly what was happening to me in the diagram below. At the beginning of the week I was definitely in the blue area, the challenges I was facing seemed far too high for the level of skill I had and this resulted in extreme anxiety. Yet as the day progressed and I gained knowledge and more skill from the support of those around me and I entered the flow channel! So, by the end of the day after a lot of hard work I felt fulfilled, re-focussed but completely exhausted!

Today usually would have been the day I was looking forward to but once again the dread crept in as I knew it was mock presentation day and more timed tasks were to come. Fortunately though I felt more confident in my abilities and knew with a bit of hard work I’d be back in the Flow! The timed task of the day presented sufficient challenge and after a focussed session of designing and acting on feedback the solution was finished [see below]. I was fairly happy with the design and I had been a lot more proactive in responding to feedback which was a definite improvement. In terms of the presentations a run-through over lunch proved to be very valuable and everything went significantly better than I’d anticipated. The rest of the afternoon has been spent collecting inspirational material as a personal treat for working so hard [sad I know]!

So all in all things are pretty damn good and all the hard work had paid off, Sam Ewing says it all;

"Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all."

All I can say is I’m glad I turned up this week.

Sick Note

This week due to illness I had to work from home. This certainly was a hard decision to make as I knew how important it would be to get feedback before the testing session after half term. However ,some things are just unavoidable and so I decided I would try to be as productive as I could. The annoying thing is I knew I was finally making good progress with A5 and things were looking more how they should. I was even, dare I admit it, starting to enjoy it! There is just one niggling thing that I can’t work out, my page is composed of two separate tables and for some reason Firefox adds space between these tables, even though all padding etc is set to zero. Does anyone know why this is? Does it mean I have to re-design the whole page into just one table? Hopefully not!














Along with the worry of not being able to pick anyones brain about my Dreamweaver issues my other concern was falling behind with the timed tasks in A6. Fortunately Steve agreed to allow me to try completing this weeks timed task via email. I have to admit I was quite anxious about this, particularly because of the higher risk of not meeting the deadline due to technical issues. However, I thought it would really put my time management to the test which in the long run could only be of benefit to me. So, when the brief arrived I was determined to succeed and knew the key to this would be to submit my work well before the deadline of 11am. A quick scan of the brief soon revealed the task was a lot more complicated then we had previously encountered, mainly due to the large amount of constraints to comply to. In a sense this made designing the layout easier but it also meant attention to detail was vital to avoid making silly mistakes! After a rough time plan was written I hurriedly sketched out as many ideas as I could, in the 15 minutes I’d allocated. Simplicity really was the key due to the label’s small size and high text content! I settled on a coloured circle as the dominant feature of the label to reflect the oriental theme (Japanese Flag). Then I made sure each element was positioned with proximity and hierarchy of importance in mind. Finding a Oriental style font proved to be tricky as everything I liked had a small capital lowercase family, which I thought would be altering the information given on the brief. Finally, I begrudgingly settled on Tempus Sans ITC as I knew I didn’t have time to search for and download any new fonts. I decided to use Times New Roman along with this feature font as I felt this would increase legibility for important information. Next I made sure I aligned everything with each other as much as possible and tried to repeat layout elements as much as I could. I reviewed the design printed it and then made a few final tweeks (see above). Even though it was a long way from the deadline I knew I had to stop as I still had to photograph my roughs and get everything ready to email. Thankfully everything went smoothly and everything was sent off with still 15 minutes to spare, a minor miracle! Overall I’m pretty pleased with the design and my performance and it started the day off really well.
















For the remainder of my day I’ve been working on finalizing elements of my presentation. My handout is completed (see above) and any feedback would be really appreciated. My slides are pretty much there now its just a case of practicing and perfecting. Hopefully this will give me a more time to devote to A5 to ensure it is up to testing when we get back. So as half term approaches I sense a beautiful relationship forming between me and my 995 page Dreamweaver Bible, can life get any better?!

Targets

• Refine and practice presentation to audience
• Focus on joining all webpages together and rectifying any validation issues
• Develop my feedback form and get it working!