Dragontown Farmers Market
Overview
Dragontown is a fictional place where humans, animals, and creatures all live. The community is not only diverse by species, but by economic and social standing. Recently, there has been a notable rise of issues between members of the community, motivating the mayor to commision my team to help address them.
Target Audience
This site was developed with the members of the Dragontown community in mind. This included fictional characters from a wide array of species, including sheep, wolves, pigs, and humans.
Goal
- To create a solution for a web campaign to tackle issues within the Dragontown community
- To produce a site that is accessible to its target users.
Research
Ethnographies
Each member of the group performed an ethnography on Dragontown by reading three storybooks; The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by John Scieszka, The Three Pigs by David Weisner, and There’s a Wolf at the Door by Zoe B. Alley.
We then highlighted key issues that seemed to arise, including an imbalance of power among creatures, animosity between species, boundaries between social classes, and the isolation of children.
Narrowing the Scope
As a team we narrowed down our focus to one key issue: lack of community. We felt that the community was very modular and that a lot of the issues that the town was facing could not be solved without first bringing the community together. Promoting a sense of community would have an immediate positive impact and set up an environment that other issues could be addressed.
After a project pitch for the Farmers Market was accepted, my team and I concreted what pages and what content would be available to a user and how they would be accessed. The farmers market would allow members of Dragontown to display their skill set and interests with other community members while providing a safe and friendly environment to make a profit and socialize with others.
User Personas
Each member was then tasked with creating a user persona for a member of the community. I chose to represent one of the sheep in the town and developed his character to include his experience/ motivations/stresses, the context in which he would use a website, and any key tasks he would like to accomplish while using it
Accessibilty
Several accessibility concerns were accounted for while developing user personas. Significantly:
- Colorblindness — Several creatures have dichromatic color blindness.
- Physical Limitations — Some creatures will be accessing devices using hooves or noses.
- Site will have to be responsive to all screen sizes.
Ideation
Sketches
Wireframes
Development
The site was built using HTML, CSS, and some javascript. This was an iterative process; input from critiques and user testing by collegues was used to influence design decisions.
My Role
Over the course of the project, I was individually responsible for:
- Generating moodboards
- Sketches and wireframes
- Developing user personas
- Determining Accessibility requirements
- Implementing typographic elements including basline grid and modular scale
- User testing
- HTML and CSS
- Quality Assurance and validation of code
Summary
The Dragontown Farmers Market website allows members to engage in their community and learn about ongoing events. This project is the first step in creating a greater sense of community in Dragontown, which will motivate members to tackle other issues of adversity that the town faces.
The Dragontown Farmers Market website allows members to engage in their community and learn about ongoing events. This project is the first step in creating a greater sense of community in Dragontown, which will motivate members to tackle other issues of adversity that the town faces.