Outline of Scope Example

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Web Design: Strategy and Information Architecture

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California Institute of the Arts

Web Design: Strategy and Information Architecture

59 ratings

Course 3 of 4 in the Specialization UI / UX Design

This course is focused on the early user experience (UX) challenges of research, planning, setting goals, understanding the user, structuring content, and developing interactive sequences. While the concepts covered will translate to many kinds of interactive media (apps, digital kiosks, games), our primary focus will be on designing contemporary, responsive websites. In this course you will complete the first half of a large scale project—developing a comprehensive plan for a complex website—by defining the strategy and scope of the site, as well as developing its information architecture and overall structure. Along the way we will also discuss: - Different job descriptions in the web design industry and where UX and UI skills fall within this spectrum - The difference between native apps and websites - The difference of agile vs. waterfall approaches - User personas and site personas - User testing The work and knowledge in this course continues in the last course in the UI/UX Design Specialization, Web Design: Wireframes to Prototypes, where you will tackle—finally—wireframes, visual mockups, and clickable prototypes. This is the third course in the UI/UX Design Specialization, which brings a design-centric approach to user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, and offers practical, skill-based instruction centered around a visual communications perspective, rather than on one focused on marketing or programming alone. These courses are ideal for anyone with some experience in graphic or visual design and who would like to build their skill set in UI or UX for app and web design. It would also be ideal for anyone with experience in front- or back-end web development or human-computer interaction and want to sharpen their visual design and analysis skills for UI or UX.

From the lesson

What is in and What is Out: Outlining Scope

By now you should have a pretty clear idea what your projects will be about and who your target audience is. This week we will talk about how to take the user and client needs that you have established and create a set of content and functionality requirements from them. In other words, you’re transforming your overarching goals from last week into specific requirements for your site.

Introduction to Week 30:57

Introduction to Outline of Scope3:13

Content and Functionality8:31

Outline of Scope Example4:39

Meet the Instructors

Roman Jaster
Visiting Faculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art

Let's take another look at the Pasadena Conservatory project for a real-world example.

Here again is the list of user and client needs that came out of the strategy phase.

Let me highlight a few of them to explain how these needs were

translated into requirements for content and functionality.

The user need to know who's on the faculty,

can be simply answered with a list of

all faculty members and having bios for each teacher will be helpful too.

But since the list is rather long,

we decided to also implement filtering functionality.

The user can filter all faculty members by the instrument they teach.

We also made the list searchable via a search function.

Another user need was to question what instruments are available?

Content that addresses this would include a list of

all instruments that are being taught and information for each.

We decided that we would also design a set of icons

for each instrument to make the site more unique.

On the functionality side,

one could imagine a fun quiz that asks the user a series of

questions and in the end suggests what instrument they should learn.

This would be especially appropriate if our strategy also determined that

many parents are unsure what instruments their children should study.

Alas this is not something we actually built.

Remember the feasibility constraints one also needs to consider.

Building such a tool would be quite involved and will take additional time and resources.

One of the client needs was to promote events.

So, for content, we'll obviously need information about the events.

But we also need a way for people to order tickets,

that goes into the functionality column.

But a ticket ordering system represents quite some complexity,

you will need to build a shopping cart, process payments,

facilitate account creation, login functionality, and password recovery.

So, we decided we would use an external service for ticket purchases.

A service like Eventbrite or Brown Paper Tickets.

The downside of using an external service is of course that you are taking the user

away from your site and you're interrupting the seamless flow of their experience.

But the upside is,

that you will rely on someone having figured out all the complexities of selling tickets.

It's a compromise for sure and in this case we

determined that it made sense to use an external service.

The client also wanted to employ photography prominently throughout the site,

well obviously, then we'll need great photography.

At this point, it's important to remind the client

that if such photography doesn't already exist,

it's high time to hire a photographer.

Later on when we're designing the visual appearance of the site,

we will need these images.

Another needs of the client was to demonstrate community,

while as content we'll need images and stories that

talk about how the conservatory fosters community.

As functionality we determined that a blog would be

a good way to provide users access to these stories.

A blog requires many additional functionality considerations.

We decided that we would have the ability to filter their blog posts by categories.

As a side note that meant that we would have to eventually choose a list of

appropriate categories but this is best addressed in the next phase, the sitemap phase.

We also decided that the posts would always be sorted by date in

descending order so that the latest blog posts will show up first.

We discussed the possibility of giving users the ability to leave

comments but comments bring up another host of questions to resolve,

would users be able to leave comments anonymously or would they have to be logged in?

The latter would require us to build a way for users to create accounts.

Also, who will check the comments for

their appropriateness in terms of language and content?

How do we prevent trolls or

advertising spam on the opposite end of the problem spectrum was this question,

would people even want to leave comments in the first place?

A blog with no comments at all is a very sad place.

So, ultimately, we decided against implementing comments.

Lastly, I want to point out that you'll encounter needs

that cannot be easily fulfilled by content or functionality.

Take for example the client need of creating an attractive and memorable website,

this need will be most fully answered in the last phase,

the visual mockup phase.

So, in the end,

you will list all content and functionality requirements in two lists.

This represents your outline of scope.

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