INFM 700 Information Architecture (Spring 2008)

Design Project 2: Publications Page for Faculty

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In this project, you will design and build a publications page for a faculty in the iSchool. For convenience, I will simply refer to the product a publications page, although in reality it may be a collection of separate pages (or a complete site in itself).

For this project, you will be working with four faculty "clients". They are listed below, along with their areas of research:

• Allison Druin, Associate Professor: human computer interaction (HCI), children's information access and use.
• Trudi Hahn, Professor of the Practice: history of information science and technology, information policy, information literacy.
• Judith Klavans, Research Professor: natural language processing, digital libraries, linguistics.
• Doug Oard, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research: information retrieval, user modeling.

The class will be divided into eight teams; two teams will work with each faculty member (but each team will be responsible for separate deliverables). The goal of the project is to design and build a publications page for your assigned faculty client. Here's what you will start out with:

• A curriculum vitae from the faculty client, with a list of publications.
• An opportunity to meet with the faculty. Both teams will meet with the faculty at the same time for an hour. It is not a requirement, but certainly desirable that every team member attends this meeting (subject to schedule constraints). It is your responsibility to arrange the meeting at a mutually convenient time. Given the busy schedule of faculty members, I advise not delaying on this and aiming for a meeting sometime during the week of March 24. It is your choice how to use this time, but the basic focus should be to solicit design requirements from the client.

The deliverable for this project is a publication page for the assigned faculty client and associated in-class presentation (see below). As with the first design project, wireframes are sufficient, but appropriate graphic design can certainly enhance the presentation. I expect appropriate use of CSS as well as any relevant technology.

Each group will be given 15 minutes to present their work in class, with up to 5 minutes for questions and discussion. Your presentation should cover the following:

• Who is my client? What are his or her research interests?
• What are the design requirements? The faculty client is naturally the primary source, but additional sources include: nature of the research field, professional associations, and other "context" factors.
• How did you translate these design requirements into a publications page? (Provide a demo.)
• What worked well? What didn't? How did you know?

This assignment is intentionally vague on specifications because it depends on the individual faculty client. It is your job to figure out what needs to be built, and then built it. Note that beyond the initial meeting, you will most likely have limited opportunity for intermediate feedback and iterative design. You should treat the initial meeting as your only opportunity to interact with the client.

Grading

This design project is due on April 14, 2008, before 6pm. The class session for that day will be reserved for the in-class presentations. In addition, you will:

• Post your design project on-line and email me the URL. I will post links to everyone's design project on this page so that you may learn from each other.
• Prepare a USB flash drive that contains all files associated with your design project. I will copy the files onto my laptop and return the drive in class.

The grade for this project will be broken down into six components, each worth 5 points (for a total for 30 points):

• Overall organization system
• Overall navigation system
• Layout, design, and structure of individual Web pages
• Sustainability and maintainability of the site
• In-class presentation
• Input from faculty "client"

I expect all design projects to be delivered on time. If you are not ready for your presentation, you will receive a zero for that component. For every 24-hour period that the remaining deliverables are late, I will deduct 20% from the grade.

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This page, first created: 14 Jan 2008; last updated: