IMS5401 – Web-based Systems Development, Sem 1, 2005
Notes on allocation of marks for Assignment 2
Note: This is only a guide, NOT a rule book. You may need to use some judgement in deciding how to construct your answer to meet the spirit of what has been asked for. Ask your tutor for advice on specific aspects of your assignment if required.
This assignment assesses how well you can apply general theory to the construction needs of a particular site. Overall, the intention of the assignment is to see whether the student understands the main design areas involved in web site development and can apply them to a given web site. Note that I am not interested in the student’s ability to actually construct a site - it's the understanding of the design principles and their application to a situation that I am worried about.
1. Identify the likely audience(s) for the site, describe their main characteristics and content needs, and explain their implications for your design. (20%)
As far as I am concerned every web site is designed and built for somebody (or some groups of people) - ie its designer has these audiences in mind when they make their design decisions. This element of the assignment aims to test the student's ability to step outside their own needs/preferences/etc, and see the site from the perspective of some particular types of users. It requires some imagination to do this for an assignment (where in a real life you would have real users to work with), but students need to show that they can recognise and understand user needs, and have some ideas about how they might go about addressing these needs.
2. Identify the main design issues which you would have to consider in preparing a design specification for the site, and explain the basis for your design decisions. (50%)
This will be split roughly into 25% for the identification of key design issues;
25% for the explanation of the design decisions and their justification.
The assignment should work through each of the design areas listed and identify the important considerations for their chosen site. Note that for some sites some of the design issues may be quite unimportant - eg a site may be an information-intensive site where the elegance of graphic design is unimportant - though clarity and simplicity of site layout may be considered very important. I do not want a simple repetition of the general points about design issues covered in lectures; I want to see discussion of which of these issues is important to this particular web site design.
The assignment should give a clear idea of the relative importance of each design issue, and explain why. Note that in some areas there may be differences of opinion about the conclusions you might reach about how important a design aspect may be - the main thing is how well the assignment thinks through the issue and justifies the decisions.
3. For any ONE of these aspects of the site design, prepare a detailed discussion of the design specification. (20%)
This is just an extension of the previous task, but this time doing the chosen aspect in some detail. The assignment MUST have references to appropriate literature to support this discussion. Comments for the previous task still apply, but this time there should be lots of detail and explanation of the options and the design choices that have been made. The specification of the design decisions should be clear enough that you would feel comfortable that if you were building that aspect of the site you would now have a good idea of what was expected.
4. Identify other web sites which have influenced your design decisions, and explain what affect they have had on your choice of design features. These may be individual sites or groups of sites. You can include your references to these sites in the body of your discussion of the design, or have it as a separate section. (10%)
This past of the assignment is really a way of making you look at web sites and identify good design ideas. Design ideas and concepts can come from strange sources; for example, the designer of Federation Square said his ideas came seeing a medieval village in Spain, the designer of the Sydney Opera House got his design inspiration from the sight of yacht sails on the water on some lake in Denmark. Students will get credit either for being imaginative in looking at a variety of sites (perhaps some of them having nothing to do with the purpose of their site), and drawing inspiration from them, or from having at least been fairly thorough in thinking through a design idea they have seen in another web site and relating it to what their site needs.
5. Presentation Good presentation gains no marks, but poor presentation may be penalised.