Reflection
Production Code here: https://github.com/jgjwhite/advmodels
Prototypes (Coded): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxSct6u_wmWaMG5MeVNTQ0dpbUE
I’m trying to do a more in depth reflection for each project this year, so that I can really understand where I can improve going forward.
See the total hours and hour spend breakdown. I had an early start on this project, and I spent more hours on it than any YSDN project to date. The thing that frustrates me is that many of those hours were wasted: unused research, unused wireframes, unused data. One of my biggest takeaways with this project is that I should have started very small: beginning with a microcosm of the entire ask. For example, I should have limited myself to maybe three sources in the beginning, and then I could have gone through a wireframing/visual design exercise with a few sections of content.
I knew of the issue of complexity going into this project (Also, thank you for helping me with it). I think the concept of “start simple” is not the right phrasing for me: “simple” has undertones of perfectionism, like how Apple products are “simple”. The right phrasing for me is “start shitty”. Shitty because I needed a way to avoid getting hung up on imperfections. I did that for this project, just too late. I cut down my research and data considerably after the week 4 critique, and limited myself to three sections of content. Then I was able to really move quickly into visual design, and ultimately into coding. While doing so, I layered on details and complexity, and I found this was a great way of designing a content/functionally heavy website like what was required for this project.
The website I’m handing in, even after the amount of time I’ve spent on it, is not meeting my expectations. The case study carousel doesn’t properly work, the narrative is confusing at times, I was hoping to up the visuals, etc. I had to make a lot of trade offs while coding.
I wanted to bring up a few issues I had with the structure/expectations of this project. These are my opinions, I can’t speak for the other students, but after spending 65 hours on a month long project, I began to feel strongly about the open-endedness of the brief.
To put it in context; 65 hours is absolutely too long. I agree, I shouldn’t have spent that much time.
But I want to offer some perspectives on how changes to the brief might better help students in the future fine tune their work for this project.
I’d recommend incorporating more explicit constraints into it. In reviewing it now, I don’t really see any constraints, just “at least ..” suggestions. Constraints would help people like me avoid falling into the gap of open ended expectations + my own ambitions.
I’d also recommend focusing the project more on key takeaways. Looking at my final product: it’s not something I’m 100% proud of at this point, mainly because I wanted it to be, visually, some of my best work. However, I had to stop the visual explorations so I could cut away 15+ hours for coding.
I’d suggest making it clearer whether or not this project should have a visual focus or a coding focus. If it’s visual, remove the requirement to code the design (I could have really made something fantastic if I spent this past week improving the visual).
If the focus should be coding, then I’d suggest 1) setting a hard deadline for the visual mockups, 1-2 weeks in advance. One in which we have to submit visual mockups to you, as opposed to a just a critique. Having a firewall between visual and coding in my process lets me hyper-focus on one or the other. 2) structure the project so that we are writing our own logic into jquery. I learnt much more by doing a tiny amount of jquery writing vs. adding .js plug-ins to my code.
*Please note that the code I sent over in a .zip will soon be out of date to what I have in github, because I’ll be spending some time improving the website over the next few weeks.
