Week 4 Review (10/26/2008): Web technical assessments

In week 4, teams worked on their competitive analyses which compare and contrast the features of their competitor/comparison sites. In week 4's class, I presented on technical assessment, and Will Garrick <will@pdx.edu> and Ben Hartig <bhartig@pdx.edu> presented on Drupal <www.research.pdx.edu/dev/drupal/>. Teams should be brainstorming and updating their web design briefs to reflect their specific assignments using the template (project_brief_tmpl.doc) and be prepared to present them in class. The briefs should focus on,

• Project Summary
• Business Objectives (Broad)
• Business Goals (Measurable)
• Features List: "shopping list"
• Target Audience Profile
• Competitive Positioning

Your brief should include your first pass at the web projects objectives and goals, plus a catch bag of possible features, a little on your audience/users, and as much of the competitive positioning you already done for your project. Use your team's Google group Discussion, Pages and Files area to collaborate on the brief. Presentations will be ~15mins and will give you the opportunity to bounce your web project ideas off the other teams and of course myself, Chet and Jennifer if present. Each member of the team should be prepared to talk about a piece of the brief.

Don't worry about the technical assessment assignment for now as you are focused on the web project brief and presentation. This week's reading assignment is Chapter 3, p49-59 of the course book, and the User Surveys article. This will prepare you for the next step in the web development, Audience Assessment. Hopefully we will begin looking at that to that toward the end of Week 5's class.

Have a good week,
Richard.