In group projects for my computer science classes as an undergrad at Marshall University, my peers often designated me as the “design guy.” In those classes, I jumped at any opportunity to engage in UI/UX design and wireframing, resulting in:

1. Software Engineering I: JERKY Wireframe
2. Database Management: NAWR Theater Wireframe

JERKY! is a hypothetical restaurant that had tasked my group with creating a website to satisfy its various business needs. I came up with the name (as an acronym of the first letters of all the group members’ names) as well as the design for the majority of the pages. I led the group on decisions regarding the layout and visual language of the wireframe. For example, regarding the layout, I decided that the Create Reservation page and Manage Reservation (Staff) page should look similar for visual cohesion. As for the visual language, I decided that having arrows on either side of a stencil/image represented a gallery of revolving images.

Many of the functionalities were required through the assignment, such as displaying a menu and being able to sign in; however, I added my own flair to these various pages, like adding a key for dietary restrictions on the Menu page. Functionalities were also impacted by the database design for the hypothetical website, a task led by member of the group. I collaborated with him and the rest of my peers to ensure not only that we fulfilled all our assigned functionalities, but that our site’s design aligned with how we planned to handle data like sign-in information and reservations.

NAWR Theatre is a hypothetical movie theater based on a database my project partner and I designed. Much of the functionalities of NAWR Theatre (another acronym based on the first letters of my project partner’s and my own first and last names) were assigned; however, I added several original functionalities inspired by the capapbilities of our hypothetical database. For example, the idea of the “Hot Picks!” page simply took the database’s ability to track ticket sales per movie and turned that into a list of the most popular movies for a potential movie goer to see (using ticket sales as the metric for popularity). Other functionalities, like the various tabs on the Staff Dashboard page, were inspired by what data I predicted a movie theater would want to track and analyze as a business.