Campus Community Connections: Overhaul Web Presence
- zamierheyward
- Jan 25, 2018
- 6 min read
Personal Statement:
As University of Maryland students, we are attending a public state university. A lot of the opportunities we have on campus are paid for by peoples taxes, as well as alumni donations. Because of this, we believe that we must give back to the community that is allowing for the university to continue to grow. Creating a good relationship with those who live in the College Park area is extremely important to the University’s success, and therefore to our own. We very strongly believe in the efforts that Andrew Fellows is taking to make the people on campus more connected to the College Park community. This is an integral part of the university’s continued success. Through this website we hope to make a difference in our community and leave something behind that helps people in the area. This website will allow members to gain access to food they may need or information on transportation, this is of great importance, a lot of times people need help but cannot find a way to get it. In an academic sense, this would allow us to use all of the skills we have learned and really apply it in a project. A project like this requires a wide variety of skills that we have learned in our time here, now we have to put those skills to the test. As developers and designers we hope to make things that last, but also things that matter. A project like this would last a long time and would make a huge difference in the College Park community.
Objective:
This proposal is going to discuss a couple of aspects of our project as well as what we hope to accomplish. First, we will give some background information on the project and why it is important. We will discuss the goals of the University as a whole and why a campus community connection project is extremely important to achieving that goal. We will also discuss specific aims of our project, going into detail about what exactly we will be doing to redesign and build this campus community connection website. Our project approach and timeline are also written out, this details how we will execute the project in the time we are given. The final thing we will talk about is the budget we have for doing this project, this is extremely important because what we could do depends on the resources we have.
Background and Rationale:
President of the University of Maryland, Wallace Loh, has listed five priorities that he believes to be the most important to the university. The five priorities he listed are academic vision, national research university, philanthropy and engagement, service and impact to state, and the campus community. Engaging with the local community surrounding the University of Maryland has long been a priority for the university, but has been a difficult task to accomplish. One of the reasons for this is that the University of Maryland campus is surrounded by a lot of different municipalities including Hyattsville, Riverdale Park, and University Park. It is also hard for students who are willing to collaborate with the many municipalities surrounding the university to make contact with them and vice versa. Just as there are a lot of different municipalities surrounding the university there is also a lot of different student groups trying to work with them. There are service focused student clubs, Greek organizations, and university wide initiatives.
Efforts to engage with the community around the campus are splintered and there is no common space for the local municipalities and students to collaborate. To remedy this issue Campus Community Connections would offer a virtual meeting space where students and local municipalities can make contact, by creating a bridge between the two. The Campus Community Connections website would become the only destination that students and the local municipalities will need. The website will allow local municipalities discover the level of interest students have in different types of projects as well as allowing students to sign up for them.
Specific Aims:
First we will gather requirements for the project and then create wireframes and interactive mockups of the redesign that we have in mind for the Campus Community Connection website. We will also create a form to allow users who would like to get involved in community projects, to reach out to Andrew Fellows. The form will allow for easy tracking of engagement with the website. Lastly, we aim to create a database of the list of current Campus Community Connection projects, to keep track of all the people, locations and details involved in each project.
Aim 1:
We will create a database of the list of currently running Campus Community Connection Projects. This database will allow for the stakeholders to see the details of the projects, important points of contact, level of engagement with projects and the overall states of the projects. An example of the information the database will have to include would be a list of projects and their respective leads. The informative part of the database will be available to students and the public but due to security reasons the contact information of the project leads will not be provided.
Aim 2:
In order to address the need for contact information, we will create a form that will allow students to quickly contact Andrew Fellows to notify him of their interest in working on a particular project. Once students receive feedback from Andrew Fellows, the students will have some way of recording that they are currently involved in a Campus Community Connection project.
Aim 3:
We will create wireframes and interactive mockups of the redesign that we have in mind for the Campus Community Connection website. The aim of the redesign is for more visuals to display to stakeholders the types of projects offered within Campus Community Connection and the locations of the projects. Doing so will allow for students to realize the amount of work, impact and influence they can have on their community. We will have access to the current backend of the website, working on it will require us to meet with the past developers of the website, Diane Travis and Dave, the head of the tech department at the iSchool to discuss their process in making the site. We plan on creating a version of the site that will give the next Capstone group/ developers a base to implement any further changes to the site, without having to start from scratch. Furthermore, these wireframes will also give the future developers a direction in which to take the design and content organization of the future website.
Project Approach:
We will be utilizing the agile process to complete our project. By utilizing this approach we will be breaking our project down to small manageable parts. As we progress through each of these small parts we will be meeting with our client to share our progress and to make sure we are going in the direction that he desires. By breaking the project into small increments our group will be flexible to change and can adapt to our clients need as they evolve throughout the project.
We plan to collaborate on all steps of our project by having short ‘update’ meetings and by using tools like Google Drive.
The methodology we will use for each specific aim will vary. For the first aim we will start by gathering the needs of our stakeholders. For the case of creating the database it can be broken into three major groups the students, the municipality, and the community connections staff. We will evaluate what exactly the database needs to display for each of them. For example the students do not need to see the name of the other students signed up to a project, but Andy Fellows may need to. After analyzing their needs we will begin creating a schema and implementing it.
The second and third aim will be centered around the design and experience of the site. We want the site to not only solve the problem of bridging the gap between students and the community, but also be as easy to use. The methodology that we will be utilizing is the User Centered design model shown to the right.
Throughout this process we will be using a lot of different mediums to perfect our design. We will use written sketches, horizontal and vertical prototypes, and low and high fidelity prototypes. To create these wireframes and prototypes we will be using free wireframe tools like Adobe XD.
Website Sketching:
Official Prototype:
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