P.M. Entry - 8th November

This week the focus for me and perhaps most of the others has been on the "Culture Vulture" assignment which has probably eaten into this assignments time plans a bit. This will be a continual struggle the closer we get to the deadline for each of the projects, we do hope to finish "on the job" about three weeks before the final hand in day.

Harriet and some of the other Photography students had set up a studio photo shoot for the player profiles but Mark failed to turn up with the players from the teams, which is very frustrating when they had gone to all the trouble and could have been doing other things that were a lot more constructive with their time.

Thursday was a productive day, we tried and failed to find Mark to ask him some questions regarding player profiles and some other details. But I did get the content for the site from the marketing department by actually going down to the office and requesting they put the file onto my USB drive. I think this direct action can be most rewarding as sitting around waiting for emails can be really frustrating.

I also received the images from Harriet of the rugby and football teams training which I then cropped for use in the Flash movie. Chris started the movie, but as he has a lot to do building the site I suggested I would complete it. I have used Flash a fair bit before so it isn't too difficult, but I think it will be a time consuming production. I need to ask him how to replace a Movie symbol as this will save time.

I haven't talked about Project Manager's meetings yet in my journal entries, as a lot of the time it isn't totally related to the assignment, but we have been discussing User Testing which we will be doing on the 22nd November. I thought it would make sense to pool all of our resources to accomplish this task, as it is a big subject the more brain power we have will benefit us all.

We will be staging a "Mock" trial on the 15th where we will set up all the systems we will use for the real test. Craig has been researching screen reading software that records the users mouse movements and we will use video cameras to record the users facial expressions but we still need to figure a way of syncing these two bits of information together to get an accurate account of the users experience.

Julian has been busy researching User testing and has constructed a user scenario which will include tasks for the user to find out for e.g. How many goals where scored in a certain match on a certain day. Also some general questions about the site design, to see if we need to change anything.

We are relying on Mark to coerce his students to help out with the user testing as they are our dedicated target audience, we also may have to go down to the canteen or the library and invite some sports students into the testing environment with the promise of chocolate (or healthy stuff of some description!) to entice them in.

The site will hopefully be in some form of finished state at this point, as we are slowly getting content supplied to us, even if it is in a "drip drip" form.