Week 13 - Course reflection.

Reflecting back on the whole course, I have experienced both up and down reactions to various aspects throughout. Looking back at my week 1 blog post, I had expected the course to provide a bit of a ‘simulation’ to what is would be like working at small tech company/startup in the real world. To a degree, the course delivered exactly this.  There was high points, such as finally getting a particular function to work and low points such as not being able to finish the site to the standard that I would have liked to present.

The course has provided me with plenty of experience; both practical and learning. This course allowed me to build upon my minimal JavaScript knowledge acquired from DEC01400, learn some basic PHP and to learn some core aspects of the Google Maps API, Trove API and Wikipedia API. Other than the technical side of the course, I found the course to very beneficial with learning to work with others in many different ways. Our team often seemed disjointed for some time periods and we had many different opinions on things, however we managed to pull through most of the difficult obstacles to present something reasonably close to what we envisioned.

In general, the course content was very good and Lorna and the tutors did a great job of engaging with all the teams and keeping them engaged with the content. Although the course was centred around utilising the Trove API, I feel as if the server side aspects of web design could have more ‘weighting’ in term of utilisation. For me, this was my first ever introduction to server side processes and languages, and I found that I struggled with some aspects of this. As I stand now, I would not be 100% confident in explaining exactly what all of PHP code does exactly (particularly in relation to who the process of parsing from server to client and vice versa). I think this was partly due to the time constraints that we as a group put on ourselves as well. However, in saying this, I had a similar feeling at the end of DECO1400 course with JavaScript and JQuery. But this course allowed me to realise actually how much I did know, and allowed me to find solutions to problems that I would have had know idea where to start 6 months ago. So hopefully my server side processing will improve with further courses in the future.

I found the workshops to be very beneficial to be able to get a large amount of stuff done with the help of your tutor if required. The early workshops were particular interesting during the designing aspects of the course because I have never sat down and had the time to go through Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials although I have wanted to actually learn how to use these programs to the best of my ability and not just ‘mess around’ as I had done in the past. This class gave me the time to do so!

Overall I think the course was quite well structured and covers a lot of content that will be useful in the future. Although the entire project was team based, the assessment was not and therefore provides a good balance in the event that something happens in your team.

Looking back, I believe the course has been very useful for me in advancing my web design skills and the techniques learnt will be utilised in the future. In saying this though, in the end, the major project group was a little bit of a let down.  Not individuals just the group as a whole (me included). When we first formed, I thought that we would be able work well together as I had worked with 2/5 before. This was the case in the beginning, however I think the turning point occurred when changed ideas. 

For me personally, I did not really like the idea that changed to (the one we finished with), largely due to the inaccuracies and limitations of the topic within Trove. When we formed groups we went around to different whiteboards with different ideas on them. Our group formed at the Natural Disaster Mapper idea and this is what I intended on pursuing for the semester. However, this changed and I found myself in a position where I was not fond of the concept, not because it was a terrible idea but because it would be too difficult to implement successfully due to the limitations of the Trove database which ultimately contributed to the delivery of the final product. As time went by, our team gradually became more disconnected and our communication dropped significantly. This further added ‘salt to the wound’ and made finishing the project successfully considerably harder. 

Nevertheless, although in hindsight I was not happy with the submitted result, it is important that I take away the lessons from this semester. In the real world, you are not always going to have everything go your way, you are not always going to have people contribute to a task, and you yourself are not always going to interested. But it is important to identify these problems early and get rid of them! So that the team can deliver the most successfully product as possible.

Overall, the course was good and I enjoyed the semester and course content.

Week 12

Next week, we are presenting to the rest of the workshop. Currently the app requires a fair amount of tweaking to be a usable standard. Icons need to textured and trove data loaded in an easy to read format. Many little things need to be edited within the code as well.

Hopefully, this can be completed by next week so we have something that has at least some of the core functions and will not break!

Week 11

This week in the contact sessions we had the digital prototyping where we had people from other groups come and test what we had done so far. Some of our functions and process were not yet fully established however, we informed the users of the aspects of the concept that should be tested. We received minor feedback on small design improvements such as repositioning the filter buttons.

Week 9 - A summary of so far...

Initially, we had decided to create a Natural Disaster Map. I myself personally, liked this idea as Trove would be able to utilised to get significant pictures and newspaper articles when these disasters occurred, however we decided that this was too boring and that idea of a supernatural event map would be explored instead. We brainstormed for a few weeks on how everything was going to look including the different supernatural beings that we would include. We decided on ufos, ghosts, yowies and a other category. 

We have developed this idea further and changed specific aspects to cater for a design that will visually please, such as reposting buttons (which was pointed out in the paper prototype), removing the timeline as this further expanding the haystack in which we were already trying to find needles, as well as other minor changes such as font and font colour.

Week 7 Journal

This week in the studio classes we demonstrated our paper prototypes as well as tested some other groups paper prototypes. 

Our prototype was mostly complete but did lack a few more specific features that we intend to implement. This provided a few limitations to the tester which they will be able to use in the final product. One of these limitations was map zoom and movement functions as well as a user profile page. However, the tester was still able to navigate through the main features of the application. I found in the prototypes that I tested, that some had features that were limited by the paper prototype and required it to be explained by the person who was the 'computer'. Some applications though, were very well represented by their paper prototype. I found the one about the article chains to most effective and best represented, this also was the one I gave the least 'general' feedback but focused more on specific features that may need to implemented such as specific error catching.

We were given quite a bit of feedback on areas to improve, mostly relating to general interface and ease of navigation. While being a 'user' of other groups concepts, I tended to give feedback on some of the more subtle human-computer interaction aspects. For instance, one group displayed a video immediately at the start explaining how to play, this window also featured a 'skip' button which I immediately pressed without having any idea of how to play. Once I got to the next screen, I pointed out that there was no way for someone who may have skipped the intro video (even accidentally) to find out how to play without having to go back/refresh their browser.

I found that the feedback given was generally reliant on how well-done/complete the paper prototype was. Prototypes which still lacked in displaying basic features such as some navigation generally required more 'effort' to use. Ideally, the application should be engaging but not be too difficult or take to long to get to the substance of it, otherwise the user will be disengaged and less likely to come back to use it.  I found that the prototypes that were most complete, needed the least amount of feedback, compared to those which still needed refinement where I was most confused about how it works. In terms of our prototype, although it was complete the feedback we were given suggested that some aspects needed to be further demonstrated in the prototyped. Overall, I think we needed to be a little more specific in what was presented and to not assume that the user will do a particular action or take a particular path.

The most useful piece of feedback we received would have been to include a whole new bar at the top of our page to provide more user functions. This would be used to put a number of different functions that were scatted in other areas on the page together in one location that is central and easier to find for the user. The least useful would have been having a zoom in function. We couldn't really implement this into the paper prototype but were going to implement it already. The exact method to which the markers would be displayed at different zoom levels is going to required some trial and error within the google maps API but we already have a basic idea of what we want.

The paper prototyping was a success and it highlighted some things that we need to remember when implementing. For the next week, we will be starting to implement different aspects including building a database/s, getting the basic html/css done, looking further into the maps API and finalising the trove search articles.

Paper Prototyping Feedback

This is some of the raw feedback we received from the paper prototyping:

Number 1
Steps: Register - > Login -> Map
Never heard of Demon sightings?? Change maybe?
Hard to find the information??
Simple interface
Interesting Idea
Paddle Pop?? Easter egg

Number 2
Steps: Register - > Login -> Map -> Look at the icons -> Markers
Timeline have a slider, limit range to make it specific
User Rank System
Trove article need to back up with users being able to edit maps
Not verified by the higher ranked users

Number 3
Steps: Continue to Map
Able to navigate 3 different ways: Timeline, Categorise, Search
Images: Article may have images, and will be displaced with the article
Maybe when clicked on a marker, it only displays only that marker and removes all the other ones

Number 4
Step: Continue to Map
Filter with Timeline and Icons to display very specific data
If its not, it will be displayed in a popup and will say that it is not a verified source

————— After Adjustments —————

Number 1
INTERACTIVITY - If a state is selected, certain statistics will appear about the state in relation to the categories
Percentage of [Category] in [State] in relation to Australia.

Number 2
Top-Rated Lists for pinpointed locations - Community Based
Filter what wants to be shown
Zoom in Function
The further zoomed out, the least points are shown (only higher rated points are shown)
The closer zoomed in, the more points are shown (even lowly rated point are shown)
Timeline
In Decades
Have arrows going left and right for year previous and ahead
OR
The whole timelines only appears as a certain decade
Have arrows going left and right to change the decade

Number 3
Add a function to filter the more recent marks which are added in by users
***Do we HAVE to absolutely find an article from TROVE to add a point of interest on the map?***
Profile page for users
See what points you have added
Have a new bar on top to access your personal stuff
***How to administer the page when users will place duplicates of the page***
Zooming out will summarise the points in certain areas of the map

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For our meeting next Monday the following roles have been assigned.

Research Trove Data: - Anthony / Remosy
    Yowie
    Ghost
    Demon?
    UFO
CSS/HTML Basic - Ian Wong
Timeline - Liam Buttery
Database - Remosy
    Markers
    Users
Google Maps: Basic Coding - Daniel Homer

Week 5

Poster and Pitch.

What did I learn about our concept/ the project/ the brief/ the design process from the feedback received? From other teams concepts?
We received a fair amount of feedback on our concept. In particular, the most common feedback/problem that we may have is accurately making the location of the supernatural events. As the name suggests these are 'supernatural'/not real and therefore do not have any credible sources or data to verify any event other than common agreeance. In regards to utilising Trove, after a preliminary search, Trove  does not return the pinpoint address of events. Further discussion on this will be needed.

It was good being able to go around and view the concepts from other teams. Many quite well developed even at this stage of the project. A couple that stood out to me was the History Chains and the Natural Disaster Map. I though the History Chains Concept was quite a cool idea and I think could have a lot of potential of actually being a successful concept  in the real world. Natural Disaster Map also stood out to me because it fairly similar to our concept and was our initial concept. It was interesting to see the other group's take on the idea and further progress they had made from the initial base concept.

How have these realisations affected my/our own concept and process since?
Most of all, I think viewing all the other groups has made me realise that we as a group need to start getting a bit of move on. Many of the groups had very well developed ideas with solutions to complex problems. We are thinking of the complex problems but are no where near planning for solutions yet. I think our concept needs a bit more thought, and I still have my apprehensions that this idea is going to be too difficult to successfully implement due to the nature of the data surrounding the concept. I do think a final 'yey or ney' needs to be made soon though so we can all but as much effort into finishing it on time as possible.