Proposal Feedback

Blue Team: Bethany Boren, Pepa Carlson, Eyren White, Larimy Wilson

September 11, 2001

Project proposed:“Campus Life”

Target Audience:MSU students

Comments:The Blue Team’s proposal for a “Campus Life” website is an excellent one with some minor but important considerations that need to be addressed before they become problems. First of all, the potential for providing a site that is resourceful and very helpful to MSU students is a great opportunity to consider the idea of “leadership” in every day life. You can wind up doing a project that is comprehensive and a great resource that would be particularly helpful as a “clearing house” of information, services, and jobs available at MSU that other sites on campus could link to. Two potentially “big” problems, however:

1.)Scope. You are taking on a lot with this project. MSU is a big campus and this is a lot of ground (sometimes literally) to cover in your research. You may wish to narrow the scope down considerably and focusing in on one or two particular aspects—e.g., jobs and living on campus, etc. You could also do something like a “first year survival guide,” etc., still targeting many of the ideas you have come up with, but narrowing the focus for a particular population. Please know that it isn’t that your ideas are not sound—it is just that you want to do a lot in a relatively constrained time period and it can sometimes be helpful to narrow scope and “do less,” but do it better. Don’t be afraid your project won’t be as good if you narrow this scope—in many ways, that can help make it unique and different. Particularly if have a strong “hook” to your home page. Again. . .possibly targeting a particular population on campus, etc.

2.)Credibility. Your reviews are potentially good, but you begin to address one of the critiques you will receive in your opening statements. It is good that you want to provide a diversity of opinion based on background, but you will really need to work on how you will state your “credentials” in presenting opinions that may or may not be very good ones, but will also exclude many people as result. In other words, your ideas for presenting opinions on classes is risky, even if they only represent your group’s point of view which, when you think of it, might be meaningless to a student who is not at all able to identify with members of your group. This doesn’t invalidate your personal experiences, but it does not fully address the idea of inclusiveness. Presenting opinions is not “wrong,” but it is not research, which need not be exhaustive, but simply more objective.

Suggestions:

Navigation. Sometimes a site like this can get a little unmanageable as you are developing and implementing it for publication on the web, since you will be having multiple links to various different things and users will need a means of getting around easily—especially if a link or series of links is interesting, it can sometimes result in a person having problems backing out and returning to the home page, etc. There are ways around this, of course, but you simply need to keep them in mind as you design. You may, for example, wish to incorporate, into your site:

  • A site map
  • Using frames with a “menu” for navigation
  • Deciding early how you want new content to appear. (e.g., new windows popping open, using the same window, etc.)
  • Test it often and using people outside of your project.

Good job. You can wind up with a very informative and interesting site, but pay some attention to the scope of your project as well as addressing some of need to present information objectively. Good luck! (5 points)