Hi Folks, here is the design brief for the project I’m working on during this workshop.
A brief summary of the business / site goals.
The site I will be working to improve during this workshop is www.australianmusicdatabase.com
The site is already active and receiving a small but regular readership. It records information about Australian Bands, Musicians, Recordings and Live Music Venues, particularly the “family tree” aspects of the music scene. At the moment it is still young but is growing steadily. The purpose of turning into a web-app was to allow other users apart from myself to contribute to the site thus allowing it to grow faster than my efforts alone.
The key users. The key users would be divided into two broad groups, those who only read the site and those who contribute to it. For the readers, which is the bulk of the users, I’d like the site to be a little bit more like a magazine or book rather than an “industrial” database which is sort of how it looks now. For the contributors I’d like to simplify the user interface to allow those who do not have great computer skills to still be able to contribute to it.
Scenarios in which your app or site will be used.
I’m not sure what to put here
Design principles to follow. As I said above for the readers of the site I’d like it to be like a magazine or reference book. It collects a bunch of fairly boring facts and presents them as a reference tool so i’d like it to have that feel. For the contributors I think it just needs to be simple too use and intuitive. Probably “facebook simple” if that makes sense.
Overall I’m not too unhappy with the site as it stands as I have no real design experience, but I’m sure with the help of this workshop we can make it look a great deal more professional.
I’m working on a docu about startups in the valley and want to build a site for it. User should be able to stream individual interviews hosted on Youtube / Vimeo or download them as zip files. It’s goal is to educate people about programming and the startup echosystem all over the world.
Key users are between the prototypical 13 year old kid in the Ukraine who wants to know more about the mysterious people doing startups and building huge companies like Google and Fb as well as the insider who wants to get a deeper and more honest look on interesting founders and investors around the globe.
Use cases:
People subscribe to channels (Youtube,…) or come here to download videos before jumping on an airplane as well as newbies who want to learn more about starting startups and people involved in the echosystem.
The design principles I want to follow… hm. Not sure to be honest… I definitely want to make it simple and clean
The design that I have in mind looks different but the grid structure is pretty close to what I want at the moment The link has a jpg with a few ideas I played around with yesterday… http://tinypic.com/r/33mx1qa/5
@kylefiedler couldn’t upload images “as a visitor”, seems like a bug…?
And I can only embed two links per post …
I’m really looking forward getting some feedback and building this project this month.
I mentioned this to @ed_wassermann and @jason in the office hours but I’ll say it here again. Please separate out each one of your briefs with the title being the title of your project. That way its easier for me to give feed back and clear for each of you to get it
Do you think it would be possible to post a case study Design Brief? I’d love to see the depth and language that you use - How to best describe customers, etc.
@jasonwong I don’t have one done right now but I can write one up. We don’t really create this formally in the design process here although I can think of a few times that it would have come in handy with a client. The goal of the brief is to get you guys thinking about the users and their actions for your project and give me an easy way to understand you project so that I can better critique it.
Each of our designers here will keep the users in mind while they are designing and when they present the designs they describe the problems from the users stand point. Its something that has been ingrained in all of us and this was the best way I thought of to ingrain it in you.
