The story was... can we design and develop a site like ShutterFly. Yes, and the timeline would be 6 months, no less. Ready... Go! Multiple wireframes and prototypes started and late nights, with this challenge. This challenge, was to work proficiently, every day to meet the 6 month timeline. Challenge #2 was custom graphics... no problem.
The solution was lots of hard work (with a .NET Developer), research, and many collaboration sessions (thinking like the user). We did tons of research on online book creation or publishing websites. We studied what kinds of pages and which pages were most important. I would dream of this UX Research or User Experience. We had to provide an easy to use solution. I started the mound of wireframes and eventually we moved to prototypes, only after team collaboration. The prototypes started to bloom and appear. We could see light at the end of the tunnel. The developer worked on the "creator" portion that was in Flash, Flex and .NET. I was the designer and she was the developer. So my expertise was design - specifically UX and UI, and her expertise was coding. So we were a great 2-person team. The completion stage was near and we were proud of going through each wireframe session and prototype session. I included a step-by-step of how to use the online publishing tool or application. The result was an online book creator/publishing site, with a convenient, user-friendly experience. (You could pay online, yes!) Managers and customers are pleased and satisfied.
