As we start a new year, we are seeing resolutions everywhere. My coffee shop is promoting it’s new protein milk and showing off all of the sugar-free options. New years are a great start for many people to try something new in their life or pick back up that habit they meant to start ages ago. For my capstone team, it means we are finally stepping out of the planning season and into a development and testing season. With the new year, the new term, and a three-week restful break, we’re back at it with fresh eyes and a renewed motivation. Not to mention that registration is now just over a month away and we’ll all be reminded of our purpose in choosing to re-inventing the website…
“Now… bring me that horizon…”
Jack Sparrow, in like, every Pirates of the Caribbean™ movie, ever
So what does lie on our beloved horizon? Over the last week, we’ve been busy at work crafting a list of all of the tasks that we need to accomplish in order to produce our “Alpha” version of our website. Everyone has their own role to play in this project and I am proud to say that we have each tackled areas that fit our strong-suits. This makes us a stronger and more flexible team, as we can teach each other through our weak areas and all contribute where needed. In our sprint meeting this week, we filtered all of these tasks on our Asana board, indicating our priorities and our simmering back-burner to-do’s. We also claimed ownership of tasks and are eager to show how far we’ve gotten when we present v0.0.3 on Monday. Our sprint is going to last into February, just about the time I’ll check in again here. However, if we work quickly through our current to-do’s, we are going to proceed forward with our next to-do’s, as we’ve indicated a priority for each task and the next steps are logical.
In my next post, you can expect to hear me talk about our finalized, high-fidelity, user interface mockup on Figma and how we launched it for user testing. I’m leading the way for my team into the UX/UI waters as that is both my passion and my minor. I’m very excited to create a walkthrough so that we can both conduct (hands-off) user tests on our family and friends, and also send it to our online buddies and fellow students to do in their own time. This feedback is so important to us as our project is almost entirely student-focused! We sent out a survey last term to get a pulse on what students wanted to see in our rendition of the website. The results were inspiring and helped us develop the end-stages of our mockup. We’re excited to launch the user testing so that we can begin to develop the best product possible!
Another subject that I’m sure I will recap on is our database. We’re currently developing our website locally and in order to test the functionalities, we have to have a mock database! Our current contenders are MariaDB and MongoDB. The deciding factor will be based on if we want to use SQL queries or JSON queries. Our team favors SQL as that is what we have worked with most extensively during our time here at Oregon State, so we will most likely go with MongoDB. I’ll keep you posted.
Something we’ve pushed off to our spring horizon is hosting. We want to make our website at least semi-permanent – not only so that students and faculty can easily access it without having to download and compile, but also for our portfolios – we are seniors, after all! The funniest bit about that is that I’m the only student on my team that is graduating this June. My other members are juniors! I’m excited for them that they are getting an early start.
On a more personal note and back to portfolios, I actually just started making my very first one! I am graduating in June, so I will be looking for a job to begin in July. I’ve already started looking, and I must say that the opportunities are quite thin for a usability engineer. However, it is not time for me to apply quite yet, so I am praying that I will find the right one, come time. In the meantime, I am stewarding my time left at Oregon State by enriching my resumé and building up my portfolio. I am proud of the work I have done while at university! I hope that all my efforts highlight and truly capture my passion for building an enjoyable user experience. This website is going to be quite the feather in my cap. It will quite possibly be my most proud achievement while at Oregon State!
We’ve also had quite the “snow” storm here in the Willamette Valley this past week. While originally fun, it rapidly turned entirely to ice last night. While the trees are, thankfully, not at risk anymore, the roads are still quite slippery in some areas. I miss seeing my sister and my boyfriend. However, I am very thankful for a good vehicle, electricity, and a warm home.
What does today’s horizon bring? A 45º rainstorm to melt away the icky ice and the perfect rainy day to begin hooking up the navigation on our Figma mockup 🙂
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