The feedback for Alternative Techniques was the most surprising of the lot.
Now, I was fully prepared for anything from a high merit to a low distinction grade, but I was totally unprepared for the grade that I received. I did invest a lot of effort into the project, but a lot of the effort was from prior experience, and I think that the work I’ve spent developing the styleguide and boilerplate for eLearning had a hand in pushing my grade so high. So in a way, I agree with Libby’s comment that I “had an advantage with the work I do with eLearning”.
In terms of improvements, I do agree that the physical documentation could be made clearer – all of the development notes were hand-written and hand-sketched, with only the research documentation being typed up. I didn’t feel that digitising any of the development work was necessary given that the project itself was a refactoring exercise and not a redesign exercise, but perhaps a little bit of extra time and effort making some neater development docs could have pushed the grade up a percent or two more.
The evaluation was also quickly put together, and I do agree with the feedback that I didn’t mention anything about code reusability, even though the boilerplate and styleguide are developed with code modularisation in mind. In fact, the whole site was developed with portability in mind, including separating the accordion and carousel code bases into plugins for use in other projects, so I think I missed a trick not mentioning codebase reuse in my evaluation.
Since the project was a refactoring, I didn’t mention anything about the alternative design in the documentation, especially since the alt-layout was an experiment with full-size headers. Either way, I’m really pleased with how this project turned out, and it was a good learning experience with regards to the development of particular elements in the design.
I just need to maintain this kind of quality for the remaining projects, and I’ll be happy.
