Week 3

This week our greatest focus was on getting the interview and survey approved and ready to use as knowing user expectations and needs are critical for creating a good website. We managed to perform two interviews with Cristina and Florentina that gave us some very important information about the improvements they wanted to see over the previous website. We also began to solidify our plans by setting deadlines for each task. This way we can focus the correct tasks and have them done in a timely manner that supports our overall plan for the project. Our project website also saw some aesthetic upgrades to improve it's ability to draw attention to the correct areas and make sure all information is easily accessible and visible to the user.

Finding Our Way

A week and a half into the project, we’re finally getting into the swing of things here. With our approval from the Institutional Review Board to carry out our interviews and surveys, we are finally able to get started with those! We’re very excited to collect data, as it will help guide our efforts in our web design, whereas for the past week we’ve felt somewhat in the dark as we tried to put up an initial skeleton of the destination website. We have been showing our progress to our collaborator, the executive board of the Transylvanian Highlands ecotourism initiative, and they’ve been very helpful in continuing to give us gentle guidance so that we can fulfill their needs. As we’re starting to figure things out, we’ve also set up project management systems, including a calendar with all of our meetings and major deadlines, and a Trello board where we list all of our tasks and deadlines, and each of us can take a task, complete it, and submit it for review. Personally, I’m of the philosophy that one can always find more work to do, so I’m hoping that these new tools will make it easier for all of us to identify areas of need in the project that we can fill. Over the next few days, we will be beginning to conduct our interviews and surveys. Using our initial data, we will be able to start creating a list of features that we hope to incorporate into the final website design.

One of the more interesting things we’ve worked on in the past week is researching wayfinding on websites. Wayfinding is how users of a website navigate from one section of the website, to some target, particularly notable when users have no prior knowledge of the website. Some websites are set up to provide users with better wayfinding experiences than others, and those where users can wayfind very easily are generally considered easier to use, and more attractive to users. Since none of us are web developers, this research has been very enlightening and we hope to be able to apply it to the destination website in order to ensure that the user experience is positive, because we want all of the stakeholders in the Transylvanian Highlands ecotourism initiative to want to use the site regularly. While we all use websites frequently, and would consider ourselves proficient on the internet, it’s been intriguing learning the minute details of how we navigate new websites--using both prior knowledge of how websites are generally set up, and making inferences based on wording and images, and going through an iterative process of predicting a route, and updating that route as we travel along it based on the real website layout. While we have an idea of general conventions for websites through experience, we have found it very helpful to read about how to optimize layouts to improve user experiences. As we continue to create the basic “skeleton website” for the Transylvanian Highlands, we will try to incorporate these conventions to ensure that the layout is familiar to users, so that they can easily navigate through the website.

Week 1

This week, we established a weekly schedule for meetings with both our collaborators in Romania and our Advisors via Zoom. A project website containing all the information about our project and our written project proposal and final proposal presentation slides was created. Additionally, we established a rough outline of the website deliverable and defined the different stakeholder groups to be separated into subcategories on the website. The broadest tier of this is tourists, researchers and journalists from outside the regions, and local businesses. We have identified several features that will be extremely useful for the destination and are currently working to establish what we can accomplish within the project timeframe. Currently, the website’s about page contains all the necessary information, as well as a feature that allows members to add new events to the website database. Next week, we intend to add further information about the destination and continue to develop key features to assist the ecotourism initiative in the region.