Design Plan & Low Fidelity Prototype

Team 6: Rachel Ogg, David Champlin

Project Target: UM Legislative Update

Part I: Design Specifications


  1. Provide one plus and one minus scenario

  2. Plus Scenario

    The setting is the graduate student lounge and Jesse, a graduate student at the University of Missouri has just received his most recent copy of the Legislative Update. He opens it on his laptop and decides to go ahead and read through it since he’s interning at the Capitol this semester.

    Action: Jesse is always anxious to open the Legislative Update now that he’s been interning at the Capitol. He’s interested in how the University interprets the events of the session and who else is impacted by what transpires. As he scans through the tidy list of headlines he selects the one he wants to read more about and waits for the brief moment it takes for it to quickly load into his browser window. He always chooses this option since reading through the articles while still in his email inbox proves to be distracting for him.

    As he reads through the articles he realizes for some reason he’s not that well informed about this particular topic. He is excited to find that there are links scattered throughout the text that will be able to round out his knowledge on the subject and begins to click around. To his delight the links all open in new tabs allowing him to remain in the same article on the Legislative Update so he can cross-reference material if he so chooses. After getting up to speed on the topic at hand Jesse returns to the main Legislative Update page and selects another headline to dive into. Overall, he finds the information to be very well informed and presented in a clear, unbiased way and he feels fortunate to have found such a great resource.

    Minus Scenario

    The setting is the office of Dr. Mary Jones, a faculty member at MU and a researcher for public policy. Mary is keen to stay abreast of the legislative happenings for the state of Missouri and has subscribed to the Legislative Update newsletter for this purpose. She is legally blind and plans to read through the newsletter on her desktop computer with the help of a screen reader.

    Action: After receiving an email alert that the latest version of the newsletter has arrived, Mary opens the email and begins to read through its contents. After reading through one particular articles Mary is irked by the inaccuracies in the content and decides she will submit a comment to try and have them corrected. Mary clicks the link in the newsletter to view its contents in her browser and the new page opens. She soon finds the Feedback link only to discover that the website does not feature labeled instructions for her text reader to tell her what information goes in each of the boxes in the comment form. Not only that but she has also noticed that the CAPTCHA system used does not have an option for the security code to be read allowed to the user.

    Initially, Mary was just annoyed by a few inaccuracies in the article she read. Now, however, she is angered by the fact that the state institution she works for does not have a website that is accessible to her as a physically disabled user.

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