On January 28th (Friday) we had a Kick Off Meeting to officially start the process of redesigning the college libraries website. The reason for the meeting was to allow everyone who was interested to have the opportunity to learn about my design philosophy and how, I approach things. The very simple answer is that design is a very iterative process where you do something, show it to someone to get feedback, and than repeat the process.

At the start of the meeting Jenica passed out a handout that had a list of the basic tasks that we will be doing over the course of the rest of the year. She also passed out pencils to everyone that said “WE ARE NOT OUR PATRONS” (yes every letter is capitalized on the pencil).

At the end of the document the following information was listed:

Meetings:

January 28, 2011: Project Kickoff
February 1, 2011: INFLUX deliverables discussion (this meeting was canceled and it will be rescheduled)
February 11, 2011: Brainstorming Meeting
March 10, 2011: Discuss results of Card Sort

(All meetings subject to change as project timeline is adjusted)

Follow our progress and process:

http://www.patrickrunfit.com/potsdamlibweb/

Homework for February 11, 2011 Brainstorming Meeting:

Roles and Environments
Choose a persona from INFLUX, and think about how and where and why that person encounters our site. Describe that environment, and the tasks they need to do. For example, a persona in an environment:

Wallace Stanfield is holding office hours, and while he waits for students, he is trying to find an article cited by a colleague in a recent paper, and also finish his syllabus for a 300-level history seminar.

What are his tasks?

We will all bring our persona’s, environments, and tasks together to brainstorm all the tasks that people use our site to accomplish for Patrick’s use in building the site to meet those needs.

And remember: we are not our patrons.

The next time that we get together as a group we will be talking about the environment where people work, the tasks they need to complete, and common scenarios that exist for the target audience. This is the reason behind the homework example (more information will be coming in a future post). After Jenica briefly discussed the handout there was some discussion that took place about things that were not related to the meeting. Once we got back on task we only had about 30 to 35 minutes left to talk about the process we will be using to create a new website. With the limited amount of time that was available there where a few things that, I just glossed over instead of going into detail.

To be continued….