Below you will find three projects that fulfill the Pratt School of Information MSLIS Program- Level Learning Objectives.

Methods: My first action was choosing which young adult developmental asset I wanted my resource blog to highlight. I decided on “Positive Identity” to exemplify the importance of young adults having personal empowerment and understanding their sense of purpose. Using the characteristics that describe the “Positive Identity” developmental asset, I focused on providing resources centered around self-care and teens understanding their importance of taking care of their well-being. My next step was aggregating the resources I wanted to include on my resource website I believed would be relevant and beneficial to a teen audience and then cultivating materials into categories. Once I found all my resources, I chose a website platform I wanted to harvest this information and began designing the layout of my blog. This action included choosing background and text colors, adding blog pages, designing the navigation bar, adding sourced images and descriptive texts for each post.

My Role: I am the sole creator of this project. The website platform is provided by Tumblr and images are cited with sources.

Learning Outcome Achieved: Foundations of Library Services

Rationale: Through this project, the importance of collecting and organizing information is illustrated through the variety of formats provided on the subject of self-care. Different forms of information were included to provide engaging alternatives and contexts for young adult users. Evaluating these resources using book reviews, organization credibility and website authority, I was able to ensure they meet the needs and characteristics for diverse people. Through this project, I was also able to understand how information can be distributed and consumed. The action of choosing an open-source digital platform, allows this information to be easily accessible for my target audience. Understanding the need for teens to access free credible information allowed me to design a cultivated resources website to attract young adults to the topic of personal empowerment.

Learning Outcome Achieved: Ethical/ Creative/ Critical Practice

Rationale: This project signifies the importance of creating a space where patrons can navigate through critical information with ease. While exploring resources for this blog, I discovered most self-care practice content are not specifically geared towards young adults, in regards to social issues (peer pressure, bullying and sex education). This sets up many obstacles for teen information seekers when looking for information on a sensitive topic and self empowerment tools on said topic. As an information professional, I realize the ethical duty of creating spaces where a library space can reach underserved communities through digital content. Choosing resources, specifically for teens, based on the developmental asset of “Positive Identity” allowed me to examine how information can be distributed for user community needs. I evaluated how I wanted to convey the information, through researching and understanding the interest of teens today. By including current fiction and non-fiction books with diverse characters and writers; and digital mediums such as podcasts, and youtube channels, this blog allows teens who may have various interests the opportunity to choose how they would like to consume information.

Methods: The first action was conducting user testing. I reached out to peers that fit the user persona created for Flux Factory. Once testings were scheduled, I moderated and took notes for the user-testing process. We asked preliminary questions to our users to allow them to become comfortable with the test surroundings and explained how their actions and comments would be recorded while they performed a set of tasks that was created for our research. While each user expressed their thoughts aloud their actions and comments were documented through recording applications and notes taken during the process. After the seven participants completed the tasks and offered their feedback, the data was compiled and compared to see if patterns emerged. These notes were consolidated into three main categories: Information Architecture, Content and Aesthetics, where we then decided on the four recommendations we wanted to highlight. After analyzing the data, I created markups of Flux Factory’s website highlighting the issues we were highlighting and re-designed markups of the website with examples of recommendations we believe should be implemented. Once our markups were completed, I entered my sections of our evaluation report and created our presentation slides.

My Role: This was a group project with two other students. The work was divided equally amongst the three of us as each of us conducted research, writing for the evaluation report and designing the presentation. For this project, I created the consent form for our user testing and the user persona for our report. I conducted note taking for three out of the seven user tests we hosted and moderated two. I was also responsible for recording on both the mobile and desktop tests for our users. For our report I contributed writing the Findings, the Problem and Solution for – Content Formatting and the Conclusion and Appendices sections. I created markups and tables for my portions of the report and implanted these images as well as key notes into our slide presentation.

Learning Outcome Achieved: Research

Rationale: A significant part of this usability evaluation project is research and analysis. Through speaking with the director of Flux Factory and visiting the organization’s website, three of the biggest questions we had before performing user testing were How can Flux Factory showcase their events? How can emerging artists find collaborative opportunities through Flux Factory? Is Flux Factory’s Artist-In Residence program page discoverable? With these research questions, we used research methods, such as creating a survey of questions to seek out target users and developed a list of real activities we wanted our users to perform. This led us to the practice of collecting first-hand data through the usability evaluation method, user-testing. Through task analysis, we were able to analyze the actions and feedback of our users to identify patterns of issues in the website design. Our findings showed us that many of our users had difficulty finding specific information they needed, which argued that there were inconsistencies in content structure on the website. Through this research I learned that observing the actions of users is as important as user feedback in regards to answering questions that need to be investigated. Taking notes on user actions, such as lingering over a link or button can be informative in forming issues and solutions to website design.

Learning Outcome Achieved: User-Center Services

Rationale: This project was created from the idea that through user experience, we must design products around the people that use them; user-centered design. This project supports this claim by preparing for user-testing by doing research to better identify the target user for Flux Factory. A user persona was created to provide better knowledge of the user community and their information needs. Once the characteristics of Flux Factory users were understood, communication formats such as email blasts, questionnaires and engaging conversations allowed us to meet our targeted users for testing.

Methods: My first action was I decided on the website topic: a creative website for myself, aimed at showcasing my biographical information, my professional background and published blog post for INFO 654. Next I decided on what information I wanted to include on my website and on which pages. I organized my information into four sections for the four pages I planned on including in my personal website: “Home”, “About Me” “Experience” and “My Work.” Once I had all my content, using the basic HTML elements, I began writing out the coding for my homepage and supplementary linked pages. I incorporated elements such as bulleted lists, images and links to third party websites. Next I began writing to code to the CSS style sheet, where I stylized fonts, the color scheme of my website and resized images. All coding was done in the code editor Sublime. Once completed, I uploaded the web site, and pages of HTML & CSS to the public Pratt web space.

My Role: I created this website on my own

Learning Outcome Achieved: Technology

Rationale: With this project, there is a clear understanding of programming languages HTML & CSS. The breakdown of web pages and layout of information showcase how digital tools can be used to organize and access information in a pragmatic way. Using a code editor to organize web-based content, allowed me to understand complex programming strings and problem-solve code in real time. Uploading to an open-source web platform, users are able to easily access and retrieve website information.