This week, we started out IA project. The first step was to figure out what problem we are gonna solve and find the potential clients and advisor. Then we had an interview with our advisor so that we can take a deep looking on the existing problems and understand it clearer. The attached documents and pictures are the record and feasibility report of my solution.
First Interview
#1 May 6, 2019
Person Interviewed: Jackson Morris, IB Visual Art Teacher
Interviewer: Bryan Zhao, art student
Purpose of Interview:
- Ask about how art students now categorize and manage their portfolio
- Ask about what art students and teacher need to better organize their art works
Summary of Interview:
- Students usually use documents, photos, desktop and folders to keep track of their works
- Students are not motivated to manage their works, so the process have to be simple
- Adding tags to files would be a good way to sort files
Open Items:
- Determine the general functions
- Learn how to make the GUI that I want
Detailed Notes:
Hi Mr. Jackson, do you remember the CS IA that I mentioned to you last week? It is about a portfolio tracking and editing software. In our learning and creating process, we have to record the progress of creating and thinking so that we can show them to the administrators and IB. Also, we have to keep track of the matrix so that we know what to write about for the final portfolio. However, the matrix, recording of processes and descriptions are all recorded on different medias, like in our notebooks, in Pages, in Word, in the gallery on our phones. Therefore, I’m thinking of developing a solution to integrate all these records, so that art students can upload and sync their works and do all those works on the same platforms, and nothing will be missed and forgotten. Finally, for the time to make the portfolio, the application will exports all the texts in relative formate and you can simply copy and paste them on your design platform (inDesign, for example). For the first interview, I want to ask you some questions.
Q1: What do you (or your students, according to your observation) usually use to keep track of your portfolio?
Mr. Jackson: Most students just have “short-term organization. It’s like they tried to organize, but after the numbers of images and documents in their folders increase, their organization become chaotic. And also, it would be better if the folder can be sub-divided, which means everything in the folder can be divided into sub-sections like images, references, final pieces, etc.
Q2: Do you think your current solution is convenient enough?
Mr. Jackson: It’s pretty much enough, but there might be some barriers. Some students may be not very motivated when organizing. They do not like the hard and complex process of organizing. So keep the process simple and visually rewarded would be a good way to motivate them and promote them to keep their work organized. A beautiful slideshow or gallery to present their information and process would be a good way to achieve this.
Q3: Do you think the functions I mentioned in the introduction is useful? What other functions do you want?
Mr. Jackson: Yeah. Now on my desktop, the images and documents have same attributes. For example, all images are png or jpg, but their artistic attributes are different. For example, some might be the reference photos, but others might be the final presentations. So, I hope that you can add some tags to your images and documents, and sort them or search them by the extra tag we add. It would be much more convenient when looking for them.
Q4: Do you have anything to add?
Mr. Jackson: Nope.
Feasibility Report
JIHONG ZHAO 