Designer and Developer Reflections
Final Reflection as Developer
As developers my groups was tasked with creating a training module for 3rd graders to understand earthquake safety. The designers did a great job with giving us strong images for the character named Duck and Cover which was a duck to help guide a student through the content. One of our big challenges happened quickly because the designers we were working with were a small group and had difficulties keeping up with finishing the storyboard and navigation. Many of our first meetings with them were spent thinking through the ways a user would move through the content. Once we had the initial structure completed then actually creating the content and organizing it in Adobe Captivate caused us several problems. First we had a fair amount of difficulties finding artwork that matched the storyboard parameters. I ended up creating several graphics because we couldn’t find what was needed searching through the available artwork on the internet. Next we realized that there were several technical challenges that we hadn’t received training for and needed to find solutions for. One partner worked on using variables to keep track of the user and which modules had been completed. I spent a large amount of time working through several drag and drop problems that were happening.
Overall I quickly realized that having three people working on Captivate presented several challenges. One of the main challenges was that we didn’t have a naming convention for graphics or backgrounds. This caused some difficulties at times understanding what was happening with a slide after a partner worked on it, so I think this will be an important consideration next time. Several slides were changed for backgrounds and graphics and having a number to indicate a file makes it difficult to go back and edit. Also we had to do quite a bit of modification of the original artwork so that the slides matched the designers expectations. All these changes which were done when partners were free meant that we didn’t have a structured buildup or modification of the content. The partner that was working with variables and the overall structure had to go back several times to fix the navigation after it was already done. I would like to next time think through more carefully a best practices for how a team of developers would pull together content and navigation.
Overall I quickly realized that having three people working on Captivate presented several challenges. One of the main challenges was that we didn’t have a naming convention for graphics or backgrounds. This caused some difficulties at times understanding what was happening with a slide after a partner worked on it, so I think this will be an important consideration next time. Several slides were changed for backgrounds and graphics and having a number to indicate a file makes it difficult to go back and edit. Also we had to do quite a bit of modification of the original artwork so that the slides matched the designers expectations. All these changes which were done when partners were free meant that we didn’t have a structured buildup or modification of the content. The partner that was working with variables and the overall structure had to go back several times to fix the navigation after it was already done. I would like to next time think through more carefully a best practices for how a team of developers would pull together content and navigation.
Final Reflection as Designer
For the designer phase of the final project my group decided on creating a training module for the design thinking process targeting 5th graders. Overall we worked well as a team and came up with our storyboard and ID brief fairly quickly. Our main challenge we realized pretty quickly in working with our developers was that we were trying to include too much content for a ten to fifteen minute activity. Another challenge that came up was having concrete learning objectives for what we considered an introduction to complex concepts. These two challenges caused our group to spend a large amount of time in meetings and sending communications on ways to modify what we had decided upon initially. If this had been an actual project for a customer I think we would have totally rewritten both our brief and our storyboard in the beginning. Our developers made several good observations and tried to work with us to accomplish the assignment and yet meet the original intent of our vision. They were not familiar with the content we were trying to develop for and so made choices as developers that completed the task.
As designers I think that we could have also gone back and done analysis of our targeted age group and see what concepts we could have modified or deleted to match what the developers were trying to do. It was an interesting process to see how far we were willing to change elements of our original design to match the actual creation of the module that was being done by our developers.
As designers I think that we could have also gone back and done analysis of our targeted age group and see what concepts we could have modified or deleted to match what the developers were trying to do. It was an interesting process to see how far we were willing to change elements of our original design to match the actual creation of the module that was being done by our developers.