The stress of timed tasks!!!

The deadlines are slowly creeping closer and although they are not until another few weeks this will be our last full working week. This is because we are now embarking on a week’s holiday and then when we return one day is dedicated to the practice of our presentations. Because of this it has been quite pleasing to see that things are slowly but surely coming together.

On Wednesday we undertook our usability testing for the A5 Builder assignment. I was looking forward to this as I was eager to see what other people thought of my website and what possible improvements could be made. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about what questions to ask in my questionnaire because I wanted to be able to capture the best quality feedback possible. I think that this was beneficial as during our group feedback sessions with Steve last week it was apparent that we needed to create a blend of both quantitative and qualitative responses.

I was quite happy with how everything went and because of the feedback I received I was able to change several pieces on the site. I feel that I could have improved on this by including a section stating “Any other comments” or something along those lines. This would enable be to receive more qualitative responses and this is definitely something I will consider doing next time. See the latest version of the site.

On Thursday we were greeted by another timed task. The first part of this was to create the grid for a newsletter and the second part of this was to organise the content into the grid previously created. I was looking forward to this task but I soon began to encounter several problems with creating the original grid. As we were only given an hour to plan and create the grid time was certainly of the essence. I feel that I spent too much time doing my roughs and drawing my chosen design out which left me with very little time to actually create it. This resulted in me creating a design which I was not entirely happy with and I would certainly have amended it if I had the time left over. Even though I did struggle with this I still felt it was a beneficial task as it reminded me just how important time in this industry is. If I were to do this task again I would certainly remember this and spend much less time on my rough work leaving me with more time to create my final design.

Even though we are about to start a week’s holiday it is no time to relax as there is plenty to do. With the presentation to master along with the upcoming deadlines I am certainly going to be busy!