For today's class, we started off with the 'Daily Futures' presentations from three groups. These were quite interesting to hear them analyse existing interfaces which deal with user experience etc. A couple of groups chose the new Facebook like and reaction system, which indicates that it's quite a hot topic right now.

After this, and a small presentation from Tim, we hopped into groups and began to wireframe and draw out paper prototypes for some of the articles we had analysed for independent study the past few days. Fraser and I chose to do it about the article on Manchester City winning the Capital One Cup, which was found on stuff.co.nz. Below I have attached photos from during our wireframing process.

While wireframing, we were trying to pick up small flaws that could be improved in the layout and interface, to make the experience easier and more enjoyable for the user. One thing we noticed, was that it took multiple clicks to access different pages as there weren't any hover/drop down menus, which made the process a lot slower, needing to reload a new page each click and hope what you're looking for was on that page. To tackle this, as shown in the attached video, we added a little drop down menu which would drop down while the user hovers over the tab.

Another strange part we saw was on the final article page. The 'Sports' page on stuff.co.nz had one main article showing, and then had other articles running down in two columns below hand, which a small description, title and image. However, on the 'Football' page which is accessed directly from the 'sport' page, the articles have been placed in more of a list approach, rather than columns, and they've got awkwardly and unnecessarily long line lengths for such a small amount of text. Therefore we changed the basic layout of that in order to reduce the time spent scrolling down the page looking for an article.

I found this paper prototyping quite fun, and it's a super effective way to see how users interact and navigate around the page, without putting too much time into coding a website and crafting the aesthetics. Rapid paper prototyping will come in handy throughout this, as it will allow me to whip up heaps of mock-ups before spending time to digitally create a prototype.

The video showing our changes to the stuff.co.nz website is attached directly below. We reduced the number of interactions required to reach the desired outcome, as well as making it a smoother journey for the user. Tristam trialed our changes and thought they were well thought out and effective changes, as he also trialed the initial paper prototypes we had done of the existing website.

I am still trying to decide which of the briefs to do, just like the majority of the class. Tristam did a quick survey today to see who would do the open brief and who would do the Dominion/Stuff redesign to gauge interest, before further clarifying the expectations and requirements of the briefs, as a few people were unsure as to what exactly fell under the 'open brief' category in terms of submission requirements and so on.