By:

Ashley Sack, Julia Sullivan,

Andrea Reynolds, & Deanna Garrison

*Money 101https://www.msu.edu/~sackashl/wa/group.project/

grouphome.html

• This topic was chosen because there is a great need in the teaching world for relevant, practical, and useful resources in the classroom.

• Especially in high school, students are learning large amounts of information that cannot always be lectured in depth. Therefore, a website specifically designed to supplement a teacher’s curriculum, is quite useful and valuable in the classroom.

• In addition, we became aware of a specific need for a finance-centered website to supplement a local high-school business class teacher. No current site existed, so we built one from the ground up and it is now a tool in which the students can refer to as well as with which the teacher can supplement lessons and homework.

*How We Chose the Topic

• The specific audience meant for this website is a group of 9th-12th grade high school age students or early college-age students in a finance, economics, or business class.

• It is also A resource for any beginning learner in the area of finance and money.

• The objective of creating this website is to clearly give direction and general pertinent information regarding smart uses and management of personal accounts and finances to prepare students for their future financial endeavors in the future.

* General Goal

• Communication Goal- To provide financial information to beginning learners who have little understanding of money and how it works in society already.

• Currently: There is no existing site for Henry Ford II High School to refer to in their business class to further their financial education.

• New Vision: One-stop shop for a broad range of financial information imperative to a young adult’s understanding of the financial world.

• Recommendations by classroom and classroom teacher: Include a navigation Bar, tips and tricks blurb, glossary of useful terms, additional resources, clear labels of information, simple language throughout the site, and basic information that only pertains to a young student’s everyday financial needs.

* Goals and Aims for Website

*Trouble-Shooting & Testing*Constant e-mail communication with Classroom

teacher over 3 surveys…

*Survey 1-surveyed students and teacher about information they would like to know or see on the site (Result: checking and savings, debit and credit, college money info).

*Survey2- surveyed students and teacher about how easy the site was to use and difficulty level of accessing pages, information, and other resources on the site (Result: change headings, change navigation bar contents, condense pages and make information more clear).

*Survey 3- surveyed students of final site and asked for final feedback about detail (Result: Adequate information, helpful outside resources, clear headings, information presented clearly and simply, navigation bar makes more sense).

Description: Our navigation bar has links to all of our pages that are clearly labeled for ease of access.

Rationale: From any page on our website, students have access to any other page on the website.

Design Choice: located at the top of every page so it is easily accessible and each link is labeled what the following page title will entail. All links are same size and color.

Example: Checking vs. Savings button on navigation bar links to checking vs. savings page in our website, which describes differences between checking and savings accounts

*Navigation Bar

Description: Our ‘tips and tricks’ has a list of ideas that help students learn how to manage money.

Rationale: We include this because it is a short version of our website as a whole. It allows you to explore many parts of our information at once in organized main ideas.

Design Choice: By putting this on the homepage, it would be one of the first things that students would see and would intrigue young students to explore the website more for their target information.

*Tips & Tricks

Description: The glossary page is a compilation of definitions of the financial terms listed in our pages.

Rationale: Financial terms can be confusing. If you don’t have a background in finance, they can make learning difficult. Having a page of definitions makes it easy for young learners to understand our website’s content.

Design Choice: This page is in alphabetical order, which makes it easy to find any definition you are looking for. Each new word is bulleted, separating it visually from the rest. Each word is followed by a colon, helping the reader distinguish between word and definition.

Example: Budget: Plan of incoming and outgoing money. It is the expense and income.

*Financial Terms Glossary

*Further Resources*Description: To provide and familiarize students with in more in

depth information about what has been touched on in our website.

*Rationale: We include this because providing these extra sources for information can potentially answer future questions or clear up any gaps or misconceptions about the information posted on the site.

*Design Choice: We make these all hyperlinks so that they may be easily identifiable and link directly to the deeper information the client is searching for.

*Main Idea Headings*Description: Each heading on a page sums up the information below that

heading on the page.

*Rationale: Students helped us to decide exactly what the main headings should say so that they would know exactly what comes next in their reading. At first, our headings were all to general and too similar. They needed more specificity and diversity in the headings to truly know what information is present below them.

*Design Choice: The bold print catches the viewers eye and makes the main heading easily distinguishable so that the reader can either skip or read that information.

* High School Student User Test

*Michael- “ Put glossary link in navigation rectangle on all pages instead of just on homepage because I couldn’t get to it from anywhere else when I needed it”. (Age 18).

*Alex- “ Have page titles next to the MONEY 101 big title so I know exactly what page I’m on and what that page is going to be about. Otherwise, I’m confused”. (Age 18)

*Lara- “I really don’t like how the glossary is not in alphabetical order. I couldn’t find anything that I was looking for. Please alphabetize them”. (Age 17)

*Sam- “Keep the ‘dos and don’t’ section shorter because I don’t want to read so much. It took too long to read everything and I forgot what I was reading’”. ( Age 16)

• Julia- Created the “college” page

• Deanna- Created the “savings vs. checking” page

• Andrea- Created the “debit vs. credit” page

• Ashley- Created the “home” and “glossary” page

• Group Collaboration: site mockups, site layout, site content, power point Presentation, CSS decisions and file, html decisions and file, communication with classroom teacher and collaboration of usability test results.

*Team Member Contributions

Original Mock-ups

Original Mock-ups

Original Mock-ups

Original Mock-ups

Original Mock-ups