✅ Passed User Experience Design (D479)

This past week, I officially passed User Experience Design (D479) at WGU. This class pushed me to actually think like a UX designer, test my designs like one, and most importantly, reflect on how my overall design had changed through iteration and feedback from users during testing. I want to share exactly what I did for the Task 1 and Task 2 performance assessments that allowed me to pass, how I structured my project, and what I learned through it all.

🚀 The Project: Designing a Tourism Website Prototype

For the Task 1 part of the assessment, we had to create an interactive prototype for a fictional tourism website offering tourist trips to an island called Taniti. If Taniti sounds familiar, that’s probably because Taniti is WGU’s made up version of the real-world location Tahiti. Anyway, my goal was to make something visually clean, intuitive to use, and helpful for anyone planning a trip to that island. So a site that helped you find the best attractions, lodging, and other info.

I built everything in Figma, and my prototype had a clear navigation bar across all pages:

Home
Attractions
Booking
Contact
About

I paid close attention to layout spacing, button contrast, and overall flow. This wasn’t about making something flashy, but about building something that was practical and made sense.

Here’s my wireframe that I created for the site:

I also had to create a timeline of the UX design activities that would take place during this project. Below you will see my timeline design (which I used Canvas for).

Here is my UX Design Timeline:

I’m pretty sure you don’t have to make it as fancy as mine. As long as you show the important details (the tasks that you will do in phases or sets of days), you should be good.

Obviously you’re not going to be actually following this timeline for the assessment, this is just a business scenario. It’s what you would be doing if you were actually tasked with the real-life project of building a website for a company. Just pretend you’re a successful web designer.

🧪 Task 1 Recap: Guerrilla Testing & Usability Tasks

So now that I had a wireframe, I was tasked with running guerrilla usability testing. So what I did was I grabbed a couple friends and had them walk through the wireframes of each of my pages while I observed. Based on the feedback they gave me, I made improvements such as:

Enlarging the CTA (call-to-action) button that said “Explore Now”
Grouping related sections together (like Lodging + Booking)
Clarifying which parts in the home page were clickable or not
Replacing the “Explore Now” text to something more immediate like “Book Now”
Adding a Transportation page to find the best method of transportation within the island

Then I defined five specific usability tasks for my future testers:

Find at least two different lodging options
Plan a half-day itinerary using available attractions
Locate contact information to ask questions
Read a brief summary of the island’s culture
Identify the best way to get around without renting a car

All of this had to be written in a Word document for Task 1 and I followed the rubric to the letter. I submitted it a few days before the course was going to end and I passed. Make sure to follow the rubric before submitting your Word document.

📹 Task 2: Peer Testing and Feedback via Panopto

For the Task 2 assessment, I had to:

Submit my prototype to a shared peer review dashboard.
Record myself reviewing three other students’ prototypes using screen capture and webcam in Panopto (yes, professional sounding mic and all).
Receive three recorded video reviews from peers, each testing my five usability tasks.
Document all of this in the official WGU D479 Task 2 Template.

🧑‍💻 Who Reviewed Me?

I received video reviews from:

Josh Rosario – said everything worked smoothly and intuitively and really liked my site.
Mark Maher – walked through each task with zero confusion and complimented the structure.
Suranjan Pradhan – despite a slightly garbled transcript (and a low voice), clearly confirmed that all usability tasks were successful.

None of them had actionable critiques, which honestly felt amazing. It was validation that all my early design decisions (and corrections from Task 1 testing) had paid off.

These were people that I found on the WGU Connect forums under the class group page for D479. There were many posts from people trying to get reviews from other students. I posted mine and got several responses after a few days. I was happy that the group page was active with all kinds of requests. I got my three reviews in about a week.

✍️ Writing It All Up

The hardest part was making sure everything was documented correctly in the D479 Task 2 Template. Here’s what I included:

Section A: My Figma prototype link and the five usability tasks
Section B: The names and prototype links of the three peers I reviewed
Section C: Links to my Panopto recordings where I reviewed their work
Section D: A breakdown of the feedback I received on each usability task (which all came back positive)
Section E: A detailed summary of how my design evolved from wireframe to prototype based on testing
Section F: A quick note that I didn’t use any outside sources, so no APA citations were needed
Section G: A final polish pass to make sure my writing was professional and clean

I also made sure all the Panopto videos had the correct sharing settings (“Your Organization – Unlisted”) and that my file size was under the required 200MB. Luckily, I kept my videos short.

🧠 What I Learned

Make sure that your prototype is designed in a way that the person reviewing it can easily find information on your site that can help them check off those usability tasks from your list.

If they can’t find the information to complete your five tasks, they’ll have to say that in the recording, which will look bad!

Also, don’t make it hard on yourself by writing overly complex usability tasks for your five tasks. Just keep it simple. Things like, “Can the user find transportation info?” or “How many restaurants are there in Taniti?”

If you just give the necessary info on your site to answer those questions, you’ll be good.

🌐 My Taniti Website

So the end result was this website I created:

Web address: https://tanititourismproject.infinityfreeapp.com 🏝️

Hope you guys like it!

🎯 Final Thoughts

If you’re a fellow WGU student reading this and about to take on D479: don’t wait until the last minute. Start with your wireframe early, run at least one round of informal testing, and build your prototype with those changes in mind. Then when it’s time for peer testing, you’ll have something solid and functional.

Don’t wait to do your peer reviews or to get started on asking for reviews for your own prototype. These requests take a while to get because you’re waiting on people to get back to you with their recordings. So I’d say start with Task 2 as soon as you can! Way before the end date/deadline for the course.

And hey, if you ever need someone to test your prototype and record a video… you know where to find me. Good luck with your performance assessments!

Last Modified: June 2, 2025