• Jonathan Dance
• Jasdeep Gosal

Develop and design a project that improves the upon a targetted process. Do extensive research to determine how the end user currently completes the process and identify improvements that can be implemented with current technology to make the process easier, faster, or more fun to complete. Consider how current artifacts are used to perform the process and think carefully before eliminating any of those artifacts.

Project Abstract

tunism.com is a concept for a website where music fans are encouraged to create interpretations on different releases in the musical world. Unlike other sites of this nature, tunism.com does not limit users to discussing songs, but also includes support for album and artist commentary.

A major advantage of tunism.com is the support for moderated discussion. In short, this means that when a music fan views an interpretation, only comments which make useful contributions to the discuss will be displayed, and lesser comments will be hidden unless the user chooses to specifically reveal them.

My Role

I was primarily responsible for doing user research so that intelligent design decisions could be made. Through conversations with music fans, I was able to learn what requirements a user would want. Additionally, I conducted a conceptual interview which consisted of observing the process a user would go through while creating a song interpretation. I learned what resources users need (such as a dictionary to look up words lyrics for the song).

As a group, we analyzed the results of the interviews and resolved that there are three different user groups: interpreters, critics, and browsers. We created an Artifact Diagram which shows how the different user roles interact and then a Class Diagram which breaks down how to build the website and what features to provide to the different user groups.

From this, our group created this Functional Specification, which was the culmination of the course design. The Functional Specification breaks down the design into details that would allow a developer to actually create the site. On the eve of the project's due date, I added the tables included in the Appendices to outline every page the developer would have to create and what interactions each page has with each of the other pages.