#chzmongr

I turned in my grading presentation yesterday morning and was so excited to be wrapping up my semester and my master’s degree!!  

https://indd.adobe.com/view/6286288f-7c47-4385-9715-8a51ca70b14d

(as an aside, if you login to chzmongr.com and experience an Ajax error when rating a cheese, please wait 15 minutes or so, without logging out or back in, and the error generally resolves itself - I cannot explain this error)

You can see my presentation at the link above.  So, what’s happening now?!? What did I learn?  And Jen’s questions -- Project reflection: what would you do the same or differently working on this project again?  Weekend reflection: what did you think of the capstone weekend? What did you learn from the feedback given and received?

Ok, I learned I am not a hardcore Drupal developer; I think that’s obvious.  But I learned that I was successful in changing the user interface to provide users with a better experience and that was really the whole point of my chzmongr project so => SUCCESS!  If I was going to start all over with this project, I would a) begin w/ Drupal 7 and not waste weeks struggling w/ Drupal 8; b) hire a developer to assist with the Drupal implementation; and c) try to sneak in one more round of user testing.  I do plan on continuing to evaluate if Chzmongr can be a “real” project and am scheduling meetings with a consultant and a couple of developers for January.  :)  Very exciting!  

What about capstone weekend?  I loved it.  It was so amazing to see everyone’s projects.  Since we did two rounds of peer reviews, I had an idea of what some of my classmates were working on, but seeing everyone present and sharing time together was awesome!  The class was organized and led to allow us all to be there and provide positive reinforcement and encouragement to one another as we tackled very large projects.  It was very meaningful to then be able to see the final results for each person.  

And what else?  Well, I’ve given notice at my job and will be leaving as of Dec. 31!  This will give me time to explore my career options and the future of chzmongr in 2018.  I hope to land a role working with a team and improving user experiences and look forward to getting started on this new chapter of my life!  

It’s been a fairly productive but rough week at Chzmongr.  

The ups: my presentation and elevator pitch are basically complete.  Plus my marketing materials and poster are ready to roll for next weekend.  Well, the poster has to be printed but it’s basically ready to ship out.  

The downs: the cheese rating form on the website started throwing an error related to the javascript operating the autocomplete functionality and I don’t know how to fix it.  It’s very inconsistent (happens at times and not at others, not related to the cheese being rated, etc.) and is difficult to troubleshoot.  I’ve attempted to continue development on the site ‘around’ the issue but it’s hard to test and improve the social feed when you can’t create new ratings, so kind of a catch 22.  

Moving forward: tonight I’m just focusing on finishing the presentation and giving it a couple run throughs.  Tomorrow, I plan to go back to the web dev and fight the good fight.  If the cheese rating form isn’t working, I think I can disable it to complete the configuration of the social feed page and then turn it back on.  Then I still need to upload the blog entries and sort out the landing page.  :o 

Tonight I had cheese for dinner, after a productive day of working on the Chzmongr site.  I’m in a pretty decent place and should have the site up and going for user testing early tomorrow . . . that user testing is still to be scheduled, but will likely take place next weekend following the turkey holiday. Outstanding items on the site build are: -complete css for the social area and tie to main menu, -upload the blog entries and tie to main menu, -complete update of the cheese data, -adding a footer (how have I forgotten this for so long?), and setting the ‘landing page’ as the main home page after users are logged in.  

This leaves me the weekend to finalize my presentation and elevator pitch for capstone weekend.  I’m pretty excited about it actually.  My presentation is coming along and really just tells the story of why I undertook Chzmongr for my final project and what I’ve learned along the way.  I hope the rest of the students and everyone will find it amusing/compelling and that it will also be informative about the UX process I undertook this year.

Tonight I went to see my real cheesemonger, who never disappoints.  He was wearing an “Italian National Cheese Team” kit and had all my favorite cheeses!   He also gave me some cheese themed coloring books in case any little friends stop by on capstone weekend - seriously!!  Could he be any better?!  So amazing!    (Pictured above, Vault 5 from Jasper Hill, Black Label Cambozola, and Cowgirl Creamery’s Mt. Tam) 

This week I worked hard to get the cheese rating form to tie to the user badges and failed.  I also implemented a new cheese rating form to get the autocomplete to work (pulling the cheese names from the cheese database).  

We did our last round of peer review/checkins for class and our final advising sessions with Jen.  While I feel behind and that I should be working hard now to make the site more beautiful and a better UX, I am giving myself this one last weekend to improve the form functionality.  If by tomorrow afternoon, the badges won’t tie to the cheese rating form, I will let them slide.  I’m checking my data this morning and doing a new import of the cheeses to include a few more details about each one.  Then I’ll need to re-establish the cheese search view, and tie the social feed to the new rating form.  

I have a test cheese form in place that is working successfully the social feed for the site.  The friends flag is causing me a little bug which I’m troubleshooting this afternoon so users will only see their friends’ cheese ratings, not everyones.  

The test cheese form is not pulling the cheese data from mySQL database so it isn’t feeding into  the user badges.  (However, all the badges, associated tasks, and flags are loaded in the system and ready to be activated!)  My plan is to troubleshoot that on Sunday.  Before then, I will finalize the configuration of the social feed and start updating the UX for it.  I’ve also begun work on my blogs for “The Daily Rind”.  I created 14 topics and have sourced photos for some and am flushing out the content for these.  

So, overall, I’m still behind my milestones but have the ability to do limited user testing and need to get that squared away.  My current work (day job) situation will be a lot more flexible after Nov. 1 in terms of me taking time off to do CHZMONGR.  (I took off yesterday and today but was given a last minute project so had to do work instead of homework . . . but this afternoon will be all for the cheese!)  

Ok - so I got the badges finished and the grading rubric along with the user testing script - now back to the delicious cheese data.  A code buddy is coming over tomorrow to help so I have all day today to work on the data relationships between the user submissions and badges and the social areas.  I don’t have any more travel for work and am taking many days off to get back on track with Chzmongr over the next two weeks.  I’m hoping after this weekend’s effort I will have all of the data relationships worked out on the back end so I can start beautifying things up front and then move on to user testing.

So, since deciding to use Drupal 7, I did a lot of rebuilding - and things were going great!  Then, Saturday night, I sort of blew up the whole site and spent a few hours Sunday morning getting it back to where it was . . . so now, I’ve got a sample form that is not connected to my database yet - not good.  I’ve got users that can create ‘cheese friendships’ with each other - so that’s great but I can’t set up the social feed until I have a way for those users to create some activity - i.e. rate some cheeses.  I have a cheese database that users can search - also great.  I also worked out how to create the tasks so users can earn badges and have finished the design of all but a handful of the badges themselves.  

Our final rubrics are due this week, so my focus will be on getting that completed and wrapping up the badge designs and loading them all in.  This is totally reasonable, but is causing me to flip out a little bit because I’m not on target with my deliverables.