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A Puzzle: How to Design a Website for One Person.

Alcom Isst

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The Assignment: For one of my classes, IGME 110: Intro to Interactive Games and Media, I am to design a website. The first step is due Tuesday at 2:00 PM EST, and reads as such:

Start designing the structure for your project website

• Who’s your target audience? What information would be useful to them?
• What kind of experience do you want to design?
• What content do you intend to include?
Before class next Tuesday, upload to the dropbox a brief (1-3 paragraph) description of your initial ideas for the site, and a simple flow chart showing the pages you’d like to include. (This is not a final or binding design; it’s a first step in the process!)

The Catch: The target audience for the website is Elizabeth Lane Lawley, my professor for the course. That's it. A single person. I've done some analysis on her. Beyond her role as a game development professor Lawley is a person heavily involved in gamification efforts, but not the development of any traditional games. Professionally she has a strong interest in social networking and what I would call "the science of fun", and more personally she... well, look at her flickr page.

I'm almost uncomfortable with how much stalking I'm doing here, but Professor Lawley was the person who assigned this activity, so I'm not.

I have brainstormed this for a few hours, and cannot think of what would be a good project. I'd assume that a good topic would be something informational related to game design, yet something that Lawely isn't familiar with, but I should not choose something that will tilt the project more towards research and less towards web development. I could email her (office hours are past the due date), but I don't yet know how to phrase the email, and want to get opinions and ideas before I try.

So I'm rather stumped.

Any ideas?

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Jimbob

First thing that springs to mind is some kind of gamedev social site. A place for game developers to congregate and either share ideas and tips on game development, or receive advice from the website on it. That hits both game development and social networking.

 

While it's rather exclusive, you have a single target audience, and there's nothing wrong with exclusivity so long as you consider a) commercial gain - adverts? Donations? and b) design - is this website a professional place or an informal social place?

 

I can't think of any other ideas right now. I think it'd be a handy website for gamedevs, to have a place to share their ideas/code/whatever and perhaps have a repository of files (placeholder textures for the coders-not-artists?) and tutorials and such.

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Alcom Isst

First thing that springs to mind is some kind of gamedev social site. A place for game developers to congregate and either share ideas and tips on game development, or receive advice from the website on it. That hits both game development and social networking.

I also need this to fall within the scope of "To be developed by a single game development student who had a crash course in HTML a few weeks ago".

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Jimbob

Ah. Guess I was a little overambitious then...

 

Are you able to expand any more on your requirements? Development time, what kind of website they want (forum/educational/interactive/etc.), and so on? Or is it that broad?

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BobaFett2

Maybe she wants you to have a different target audience? She may be grading it, but that doesn't mean that the site has to be aimed at her. I doubt she would do that - it would make for very repetitive sites if they were all aimed at her.

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Alcom Isst

Maybe she wants you to have a different target audience? She may be grading it, but that doesn't mean that the site has to be aimed at her. I doubt she would do that - it would make for very repetitive sites if they were all aimed at her.

I asked her. She said "herself".

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Quisoves Potoo

Judging by these two photos, she seems to be something of a gourmet. Fine food in general seems too broad a topic, but how about a website devoted to wine?

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BobaFett2

 

Maybe she wants you to have a different target audience? She may be grading it, but that doesn't mean that the site has to be aimed at her. I doubt she would do that - it would make for very repetitive sites if they were all aimed at her.

I asked her. She said "herself".

 

That is going to make this assignment a pain. Oh well.

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Seaborgium

I would try to find out whether she is judging it on how much it appeals to her tastes or how objectively well structured, designed etc. it is.

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Starrocks923

I have an idea, if it's not too late. Name the website after her-"Websitetomygratefulteacher.com"-and make some kind of interactive display of stuff she's grateful for. She can look through a gallery of stuff she's grateful for, vote on what she's most grateful for... All I could find was that she is a super grateful person. Maybe you could ask your roommate or girlfriend to help. Heck, I'm guessing your parents would love to give you advice-they are the ones paying for you to go to Rochester, after all.

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Sim

Maybe you can create some kind of "matching pairs" game with a simple but good design which gathers random photos from her flickr page. After finishing the game, a brief summary is shown of what the pics are about... 

 

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