Product

If you're visiting this page from the "Your Task" page to sneak a peek at the product, feel free to scan down the page to get a feel for what your design grid might look like. Don't worry if you don't understand all the aspects to creating this product yet. You'll be prepared if you follow all the steps in order on the left side of the page.

If you have followed all the steps, you should now have lots of ideas and notes from research on the Internet and discussions with your team members. You can always jump back to the "Team Work" page to do more study if needed. The work you do on this page should definitely be done as a team, so get everyone together.

Now it's time to develop the "design grid" that Chris and, ultimately, the CEO want. If you're thinking back to the "Your Task" page, the design grid is like a chart with fill-in boxes. Down the left side of this chart will be the four to six critical characteristics of the perfect web site. Across the top will be levels of quality, from poor to perfect. It's up to your team to fill in the boxes with descriptions of the perfect (and maybe not-so-perfect) web site.

Imagine your team was creating a design grid for the perfect house, what would be the critical characteristics you'd use? How would you describe different levels of quality for each characteristic?

Maybe you'd choose construction, ease of maintenance, eye appeal, location, and livability for your critical characteristics. You'd rate houses by describing what poor, acceptable and perfect would look like for each characteristic.

Perhaps your design grid for the perfect house might look something like §this.

You probably noticed that all the boxes aren't filled in. When you create your design grid, be sure to fill in all of the boxes. Hopefully, there's enough there on the house example to help you understand the design grid concept. Of course, your group might have picked different characteristics for the perfect house. And you might have decided to have more quality ratings than the three shown (poor, acceptable, and perfect). Members of the group might have had different opinions and you'd have to work out your differences to come up with a final grid.

Use what you've learned on this page to start the team discussion about the design grid for the perfect web site. Your first job will be to decide the 4 to 6 critical characteristics of the perfect web site. Then you can decide how many levels of quality you'll use to rate these characteristics. Finally, you'll have develop meaningful descriptions for each box in the grid. Remember to steer clear of subjective words like cool and awesome.

Have you thought about how you'll present your grid? If you know how to build tables in HTML, you could create a web page for presentation. Or, you could use paper. Some word processing programs like Microsoft Word have a "tables" function or you could use a spreadsheet and print out the grid. Spend a little time in team work discussing the best way to present the grid. This CEO is looking for a quality product.

Once your team has completed your "Design Grid," click on the "You found it !!" button above on the left.

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