Comments on: “Benchmarking” assignment

By: Thinking Allowed » Blog Archive » One Step Closer

Thinking Allowed » Blog Archive » One Step Closer — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:37:31 +0000

[...] My teammates – The World Through My Eyes and Well Comm – spent several hours Saturday discussing the benchmark assignment for our project. It was a rather interesting meeting as we worked through the tools that Professor Halavais suggested to use in his blog post. [...]

By: Alex H.

Alex H. — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:04:14 +0000

As I noted in class–if you are working as a group, you should do the project as a group. You may choose to write your own analyses and combine them, or however you think will work best for your group’s work patterns.

By: Janelle

Janelle — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:39:24 +0000

As far as collaborating with team members goes, I was wondering how much of an individual assignment this is. I understand we’re supposed to write our own analyses, but are we supposed discuss our ideas and the websites etc. with our team members before we complete our assignments?

By: Alex Halavais

Alex Halavais — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:40:06 +0000

On each of these prep assignments, you should split things up as you like (that is, the assignment is not double or tripled depending on the number of people). But you should present a single, cohesive assignment on one of your blogs, and link to it from the others.

You are not, however, limited to four if you think more are useful.

By: Laurie

Laurie — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:26:05 +0000

If you are working in a group should we combine our efforts into evaluating our 4 major competitors or should we each evaluate 3 or 4 sites (meaning we would evaluate 9 to 13 sites since I am working in a group of 3).

By: Alex H.

Alex H. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:22:22 +0000

My hope is that the 502 work was largely based on the visual aesthetics (layout, design, etc.) of the competition, and less to do with user needs, function, etc. In fact, they may be completely different sorts of things.

Take, for example, someone who (as in the 501dc class) was looking for comps for a site that rates companies. He pulled design comps from (among others) Rate My Professor. But this isn’t in the same market space as the site he was building. Glassdoor is close, and so he included it.

So, in short, I’m assuming that you were looking for design comps for 502. As noted, this is really more of a competitive analysis: where are people going now and how does your site compare?

By: Twunked

Twunked — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:21:45 +0000

If we did our 502 papers on “the competition,” can we use that research as a large part of this assignment?