Key Milestones for the Text Seeker project

Phase 1: Planning (ongoing)

Weekly meetings with the Text Seeker team will be held on Tuesday’s at 11:00am in TSH 202 at McMaster University. This will keep the team up-to-date with what everyone is doing individually, help to bring ideas together, and to present and critique designs, findings and anything else useful to the progress of www.textseeker.com. Individual meetings between the interactive designer and his Multimedia Senior Thesis advisor, Professor Geoffrey Rockwell, will also be held weekly on Wednesdays in TSH 309a at McMaster. The Text Seeker team will be adding to a public wiki found at http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/MiniTAPoR as well as recording meeting notes in a private source. The team’s interactive designer will also be updating a blog at http://www.textseekerta.blogspot.com for all to read.

Phase 2: Personas (January 22, 2008 - February 5, 2008)

A persona is a description of a potential user (a fictional person) who represents a perceived important user demographic for the site. By creating a persona for a developing website, a site designer is able to convey to the development team and client the type of person expected to use the site. The Text Seeker team will create three personas that fit the site profile. These will be presented in segments before their final due date. As personas are brought to the table, they will be critiqued and re-worked.

Phase 3: Scenarios (January 22, 2008 - February 5, 2008)

Scenarios essentially build upon personas. A scenario of use describes how a particular person would act in a situation when encountering a website. For each persona, the Text Seeker team will write at least one potential scenario in which the user would enter the www.textseeker.com and navigate through it. These will be constructed and presented to the Text Seeker team along with the corresponding personas. Again, they will be assessed and re-worked until complete.

Phase 4: Wireframes (February 5, 2008 - February 19, 2008)

The wireframes will address the positioning of elements like: the core content, navigation, titles, logo, headings, signature, help or site map, search, and privacy statement. Text Seeker wireframes will not express graphic design as a component of high importance, but will likely give the client a vague idea of what the pages could look like aesthetically speaking. The wireframes will present a set of possibilities for content layout in terms of page design. This phase will take approximately two weeks to complete.

Phase 5: Graphic Designs (February 12, 2008 - March 11, 2008)

One of the fundamental phases of this project is creating the finished page designs. The graphic designs will include the elected wireframe of layout as well as each design element from typefaces to colours to logos. The interactive designer will experiment with possible logos, icon graphics, text size and typeface, colours and more, generate approximately three polished designs and present them to the Text Seeker team. The client will then choose a final graphic design that best suits the projected user base.

Phase 6: Programming (March 11, 2008 - March 18, 2008)

The Text Seeker programmer and interactive designer will team up and work on the design-code mergence. In order to program code to make www.textseeker.com a working site, the programmer will have to work closely with the interactive designer to make sure the transition runs smoothly.

Phase 7: Testing (March 18, 2008 - April 1, 2008)

The programmer and interactive designer will need to run a number of tests on the site before it is released and check for bugs and errors. If there are any bugs, these will need to be repaired before the site is open to the public.

Phase 8: Presentation (April 2, 2008)

The project will be presented to the McMaster Multimedia graduating class of 2008 and guests sometime in the beginning of April.

BradKarelson - 31 Mar 2008