Paper Prototype

Bad news, we didn't have a paper prototype. Our group member who was making our prototype had some substantial family problems and wasn't able to bring it in. All in all, we kinda understand why that's happened so it isn't a huge deal.

We scraped through for the lesson today by using a super early prototype to show people the basics of the website. It did what it needed to do and we got some great feedback based off what people saw, We're going to make some big changes to the UI based off this sometime soon.

One interesting thing I found was that a lot of people didn't notice our initial date slider at the bottom of the screen. Because we knew it was there we didn't realize that have a grey slider on a primarily grey background wasn't the best idea. Who knew right?

I'll be updating that to be a lot more noticeable so that everyone realizes its actually there and can be used.

Old UI:

New (Slightly) Updated UI:

Week 12 and 13

The last two weeks of the project were spent finalizing some of the features and fixing some bugs in the code. It kind of sucks not being able to write a whole lot about the last two weeks but this is how it is in the end.

On the final day I spent much of my time writing the final report for our group. During the lesson I spent almost the full two hours writing almost 1400 words in order to finalize the report. Other group members spent the last tutorial class fixing all the bugs.

We did have to put on our part of the classes trade show this class as well. This was very similar to the digital prototype week. Between writing sections of the report, we spent a lot of time showing off the final version of our project to the class. It did take away from practical time to work on both coding and report writing but overall it was nice to get some positive comments from our class mates.

Overall with the project finished, we achieved much of what we initially set out to do. Electory functions as a platform and achieves much of what we aimed for in the initial scope. We did miss some features of the website but unfortunately that was inevitable due to the group losing some members.

Week 11 - Digital Prototype!

This week we got to show off our digital prototype to the class. Because our group size is pretty small I spent the entire class showing off our prototype to other people in the class. As the class went on I got a lot better at explaining the entire concept (Sorry to the first people who got probably the worst explanation ever).

Overall it went pretty well. A lot of people seemed pretty impressed with the scope of the prototype and how functional it was in comparison to some groups. It's always nice to be praised for your efforts!

We did have a few issues that came up relating to user feedback. Small UI issues were brought up by a few people which we tried to fix with them. It really shows that you can never really have enough user feedback.

The tutors seemed pretty impressed with the prototype as well. It's nice that they are being supportive given the problems with members of our group leaving throughout the semester. Hopefully that sympathy flows through to the marking stage!

Week 10

Today we're back from break and boy have some strides been made. I got the newspaper search functionality completed over the break so we have a major section of trove functionality working perfectly. Well almost perfectly but pretty close!

We do need to work on making it search via the date selected as well but thats a problem for another time!

Week 9

Fairly quiet week in week 9. We mainly looked at bug fixing some of the trove functionality to get it working as well as we could. There seems to be a lot of issues getting Trove to work perfectly every time. This problem is probably the biggest issue we face at the moment :/

We did get the chance to do our second group presentation today. While lacking some core functionality we did well overall. The site works well enough to be passable.

Week 8

I think I missed the window for this post but oh well, better late then never right?

Back in week 8 we had a bit of work to do after the paper prototype. After using a semi working technical demo instead of a paper prototype we had a lot of good feedback to work on. We tried to focus on this feedback and brainstormed ideas on how to solve some of the problems that came up.

One interesting piece of feedback was that a lot of people were confused about how to use the app correctly. After creating something yourself its very easy to get lost in the mindset that your creation is perfect in every way and doesn't need changing. While I don't think that was our thought process, we might have been heading down that path. To combat the learning curve, we decided we would put in some information boxes that users could click on to see what they needed to do. Our hope is that these information windows will solve any learning issues new users might experience.

Week 5 Post

We got to do our presentation this week! Hooray!

It seemed to go well I think. One of our group members is a really good public speaker and can really entertain a crowd. Our concept is simple enough that everyone understood the purpose of the web app which made the presentation go quickly and easily.

After a quick 5 minute presentation explaining the idea, we sat down and watched the other groups present. Easy day all in all.