Objective
In the ideate stage, my teammates and I created a creative matrix, a sitemap, and thumbnail sketches correlating to the sitemap. In the creative matrix, we were to develop “How might we” questions that were neither too broad nor too specific. After each member generated ideas for the questions, we prioritized the top ones to create a sitemap. For each aspect of the sitemap, I developed quick sketches to have a visual of possible organization ideas for the website.
Creative Matrix
With my professor’s help, I learned that “How might we” questions should be made with a solution in mind for our creative matrix. This suggestion enables designers to create successful HMW questions that have a possibility of providing just enough ideas. Making these questions helped me understand why the design opportunities from the user journey maps should be implemented and are necessary. For example, one of our questions was, “How might we make students feel safe in their major decision by sharing career opportunities?” This question not only hints at the big solution, but it also gives us room to provide ideas of how a career path feature should be displayed (navigation and design-wise). With that being said, I realized that HMW questions can determine the quality and quantity of the design ideas that we come up with, depending on how well the questions
are made.
Sitemap
I think that creating a sitemap was incredibly useful because it helped me understand the navigation of our website. Since I’m a visual learner, this allowed me to break down our pages and information and organize them into
different sections. I found most sitemaps that I looked at for inspiration to be a little confusing to read, so we made sure to label each section accordingly in
our version.
Sketches
Whenever I sketch for something, I spend a lot of time adding notes and extra detail. With the instructions given for our sketches, I realized that sketching should only take a short amount of time so that I can generate as many iterations as possible. I learned that sketches are merely a tool to quickly understand and visualize how a page might look. If a sketch is too crowded, it becomes more difficult to read, which defeats the whole purpose of sketching.
Challenges
While making the creative matrix, I found difficulty in making sure the HMW questions weren’t too broad or too specific, as I kept creating questions that were too broad. After our group received tips about how to transform the questions to be more specific, I was able to grasp the concept even more.
Regarding the sitemap, I had trouble figuring out how each page should connect. I needed to make sure that we had just enough subpages to convey enough information, but not be too confusing, because I received multiple insights from interviewees stating that websites that opened up too many tabs were annoying. We’ve solved the connection issue by splitting up the information into sections on the home page and 5 different tabs.
At first, it was hard not to spend too much time on my sketches because I tend to add too much information, but that would just cause issues of information overload. Figuring out where and how information would appear was difficult as well because I wanted the pages to be as clear as possible. Eventually, I simplified the sketches to just a few words and illustrations per page.
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