first steps

It’s been almost two months since my last post and quite a lot has happened.

I am so thankful that I got to watch two of my friends get married (on the same day!) and a week later, my own sister. Holiday plans are starting to come together for Thanksgiving and I am so excited. It is one of my very favorite holidays. I would like to think that it is an extra special reason to be thankful. We should be thankful year round for the blessings in our life. It’s not about the turkey, stuffing, football, hockey, or even the long weekend. It is a good practice to be thankful about the hard things, too. A great example of this has been my college journey. It has been difficult, with many late nights, early mornings, bold decisions, several devastating losses, and many, many tears. However, I am so incredibly thankful for all of the opportunities, life lessons, career influences, and educational achievements that I have been blessed with throughout this journey.

I am also incredibly thankful for progress that my capstone team has made thus far. We’ve been busy creating plans and proposals. Through this process, we’ve been able to see our vision for the website come into focus. More specifically, just how we are going to achieve delivering the perfect user experience that we set out to give. Our passion for rebuilding this website came from fear, confusion, and frustration with the current website. We’ve got many good ideas on what to do to avoid what we want not to do. I’m so eager to implement these ideas. Right now, we’re scooping up influences from different schools and looking at their registration and class schedule pages. We’ve know from the beginning that we wanted to use React and its related components for our back-end and development framework. On the design front, however, we’ve been asking ourselves some important questions:

• How many pages do we want the website to have?
• What capabilities do we want our checkout cart to have?
• Can users access their cart before registration?
• Can they have multiple carts?
• How do we want to display search results?
• What do we want our advanced search filter drop-downs to look like?

I’m thankful to announce that my team has answered all of these questions, at least to the best of our ability for the planning phase. There are many more questions and decisions to come as we design, test, and develop! For the most part, we were all on the same page. After some crude drawings, we settled on a plan! We’re currently in the process of getting our first working version published on GitHub. After that, the focus is going to shift to the design aspect. I am already busy at work utilizing Figma to create a mockup of our website’s design, layout, and flow between pages. This will allow us to eventually conduct human usability tests and build the most usable, straight-forward outline that we can before turning it over to development.

I am so thankful for my passion being absolutely in the HCI / UX / UI field. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been creating a book library app on Figma for my New Media Connections usability course. Even though I’ve worked with this tool before, I’m learning more about how powerful it really is. My app is looking sharp and it feels like a real app. I’m excited to get to apply this knowledge to our Figma mockup of our website and teach my peers what I have learned so that we can create the best product possible! I mentioned in my last post that I had quite a bit of fears when it came to this course. I wasn’t sure that I was going to get a project that I was interested in, and nor would I have the skills to contribute. I am so thankful to have a project that I am passionate about, can contribute amply to, and I know that we are going to produce an end-product that we will forever be proud of.

Finally, I am so thankful for my team. We’ve worked very well together, flexing between jobs, weddings, and housing moves. We are each utilizing our strengths and lifting each other up through our weaknesses. I cannot wait to reflect back on our progress on my next post!

May you have a wonderful, blessed thanksgiving <3