»structure«

So....

sketch #1 and sketch #5 are in. The first one because of its clear structure (especially organizing the content to the left) and the later because of it's coloring.

But.... the first one is .... ouah ... very boring (I never thought anybody would ever choose for that one) but I have to admit that the last one (yes, it was my favorite) is (againagainagain) too decorative and playful. And I kind of think that the coloring is a bit too soft but I guess I can still add something there.

So now it's up to combining elements differently and actually try some animation stuff. Like zooming into the map and things.

My web app is gonna be wonderful :) It's going to illustrate the daily cultural differences one - well, actually one is someone German - most likely comes about working in Poland. In order to promote understanding, culturally influenced behavior at the work place will be drawn upon historical events, educational structures, daily living conditions... That's all. (Why is "all" so difficult?)

There are four main categories: staff formation, promotion of motivation, meetings/organisation of the work flow, contact to externals. These main categories I wanted to function as independent "training"-units.

For example: contact to externals will have a page for each step that is to be taken.

1. Find somebody who knows the person you want to get into contact with, get introduced.
2. Call the "external". Talk about everything but work.
3. Write a letter. Write about everything but work.
4. Go and pay the external person a personal visit.
5. ...

In general these sub-pages-training-steps will be linked to the meta-level. The urge to establish personal bounds as foundation for business actions can be explained by the Polish history: on the one hand the control of the people by a socialistic regime brought the people closer together and on the other end during the era of deficiency in the 1980s a lot of goods for daily use for not publicly available but only by means of personal networks.

So... there is already the next problem. At what point, where in the training-unit can you navigate to the meta-level?

And to make it more complicate.... in order to have a network and to deliberate cultural complexity and to promote intuitive learning (and just to make some reasons up) I wanted the meta-levels to consist of different steps/units, too. It's like picking out a history book to look something up and then you start flipping through some pages and end up somewhere else. And at various points you jump back into the one or the other main category.

Thus.... now! Uff! What a huge knot! And my teacher wants to know what the start page will show... gee... good question. The start page, the second page, can somebody please scrap the good from the evil ideas out of my head. And worst of all.... what happens when you're confused? You fall back to the usual. I've been designing numerous websites these last days that would work for a restaurant just as well.... argh. I want my concept to show. I want the design to be nice. I want the website to be something special. I want. I want. I want.

Alright.... what needs to be on the very first page. Associate with the idea that the user has to directly see - oh, this is involving business! and oh, this is involving me going abroad to some unknown culture.

So... this is it. My state of mind. Do you still believe I'm happy with my project? I am. I'm so liking it. This is a manifesto.

Yeah.... somehow done. Will still need some modification but that's why it's called a working model.

So.... I'm back to the big overall concept. Clicking on the picture gets you to a Flash-page demonstrating which pages will be interlinked with each other.



Still need to re-work the typeface but should be alright for now. Any suggestions welcome.

An official consultation today revealed the following....

Another possible layer of structure could be categorized into business life with two sub-categories - issues within and issues outside the company -, and a second main category concerned with the individual (private) living situation.

I, too, need to think about user rights. My teacher drew my attention to information that is enterprise-sensitive - thus information they do not want to share with their competitors. On the other hand, employees might not want to share problems they encounter in their private lives with their superiors nor with their subordinates.

I agree that I will at least need to think about it theoretically. This leads to the general question of the level of participation of users: do I want them to put in their own content? While I love things to be interactive I'm very afraid that this web application is growing too big. I don't have the time to put every possible feature into one website. Nevertheless I definitely need to include possible features in my thinking.

While talking about corparate-sensitive content he also suggested to create an extra area that companies can "buy" and design according to their own guidelines, including their logo and stuff like that.


Discussing the interviews coming up he also pointed out that I need to be a bit neutral about the topics I want to talk about. This means that I will have to be open to see which topics are actually relevant for expatriates. Thus even though I anticipate the historical impact on German-Polish relationships to be relevant I should not push people into that direction. He said that for example the rebellion in the Ghetto of Warsaw might come up in one interview again and again but that could be simply due to the location of the company in Warsaw.

It's done. What a relief. The structure board for my web application. I tried to put in all possible aspects of work. This might seem a little crowded at first but it reflects pretty much the collage I have in mind. Additionally, I will have to kick out points to which I will not get enough information. Thus:



click to enlarge ...

Tomorrow I'll add specific information about Poland to this abstract. Stay tuned ;-)

I decided on the structure board to be so fullfullfull because it is reflecting the collage-character of the web application. There will not be a typical navigation bar with the main categories and their sub categories. Each screen will include several linkages which will take the user to different sights.

The page on "continued training" for example could link to "motivation" but as well to general "concepts of education". The later would for example link to the "model employee" since the way and content of learning reveal quite a lot about desirable character traits.

I'm not sure if it works. I can understand that people get lost but for now it's my working model. Maybe I can break it down into more general categories later but in the moment that would not help me much - I need the overview...

So, now I started to sort information I have about Poland. Every icon on the structure board will in the end be at least one page in the web application. Thus I try to collect which will be the content of these pages.

One will be on the model employee:


One will be on issues such as motivation and feeback:



I started some more but to all of them I will need to add much more content. So this is just to give an impression.