Journal 13: Reflection on trade show

    This week my team had prepare for our trade show.

    

    I designed a poster for this trade show. There are three main purposes of this poster. Firstly, the users can understand the concept and know how use our web product after reading this poster. In oder to achieve that, I print an interaction maps and task flow to try to help audience to understand interact with this web. I also write some brief instructions for each webpage. Secondly, I want to use the poster to target our audience. In this case, I put two personas at the button of the poster.  Personas can offer a practical way to understand the needs of our target audience for designing the product and creating a document for them and keeping the user's point of view. Thirdly, we should sell our produce to audiences and advancing it. For example, we need to tell why our project is good and what can they do use our project. Using a attractive poster is a good way to demonstrate our project to the audience.

    

    After showing the poster, we let the audiences and tutors to use our web. They can interact with it. Also, we lead them and tell them some interesting parts like play the puzzle game we designed.

    Then, some audience will give us some useful advices. They suggested that  it sometimes confuse them if the puzzle has the same color because this game is record the order of puzzle in program. It check whether the order of puzzle is correct, but for them it is no difference when two piece puzzle has the some color visually. The issues are the system will not recognize they are right and it is hard to change it because they are the same color. The improvement is that each piece of puzzle has different shape. Even two pieces are the same color,  people can also distinguish them by their shapes. Another suggestion is that where users select a year on timeline on homepage, then click on start button. It is no response. They have to select time and click image on slide show to enter a map page with a specific year. I will fix that. I will design a label to prompt users please click on the image, and create a new link on start button.

Finally, we got 11 stickers and it means 11 people like our project.

    In addition, I experience some project from other groups.  The most impressive concept I remembered is "Mining a job". People can find mining jobs through this site. They shows accidents on the map. This can warn people if there are too many accidents in this place, do not work here. I like this idea. However, I given two small suggestions to them. One is the button on home page is clear, it  might be hard to find by other users  and they can use some light color to highlight and mark it easy to be found. 

     Another suggestion is when user want to search something, there is many information they need to fill up. I think that it can be simplified. The can mark which question  is compulsory, It might be clear for the users.  

    Another concept I liked is called "Music library". Overall, their idea is petty good. People can search their favorite historical music, play the music and interact with the puzzle game. I really like this interface. It looks beautiful.

    There is a little problem. When people shift the music sheet to the next one. The music will be still playing and it will not be change to the next song. Also it will not be updated. They tell me they only prepare two songs in database. I suggested they can fix that or add more song into their database. Every song should match their music sheet.

    In sum, I got many useful ideas about my project and given some advice to other group in trade show.