Project Conway #02 - the user journey

Back in December we kicked off an interesting collaborative education project between Deeson Online and the University of Kent’s TinkerSoc and School of Computing called Project Conway.

The aim of Project Conway

The main objective is to produce a large display panel - or installation - with a series of LEDs that will show the simulation developed by John Conway called the Game of Life. This will also connect up to our Little Printer, which will print out the 'obituary' of each life cycle, triggered by members of the general public.

The final creation will be presented at Digibury on March 12 before being installed in a fixed location for people to interact with.

We're following the team of students - Michael Wilson, Richard Lancaster and Geoff Dodds - as they progress with development and this blog focuses on the web interface that the general public will use to kick-start a life-cycle. Or in other words:

The user experience

Obviously when you're building something, anything, that requires interaction from someone who doesn't know what they're doing, you need to hand-hold them as best as possible.

Preliminary user journey specification

With this in mind the students approached the task by initially plotting out the preliminary user journey specification, as shown in the slide deck below.

Basic preliminary web application mock-up

Once they had the preliminary user journey specification down, they then applied the principles to produce the basic preliminary web application mock-up. Remember, the mock-up has had no user interface consideration, but it is something something they will address.

The next steps will be to test the basic web interface with real users. So watch this space.