Progress report summary and overall project progress (Wk 9)

This week our team presented our work-in-progress website as part of the Part B progress report presentations. Whilst working on the project, we ran into several problems which stunted our progress so we are not as far along as we had initially hoped. These issues were mainly technical, and revolved around the restrictiveness of the Twitter API and lack of formatting from the SLQ databases. To meet our minimum viable product (MVP) we specified earlier in the semester, we still have to finish/fix:

  • The calendar
  • The Twitter column
  • The SLQ data column
  • General formatting
As many of these issues only require a small amount of change, we believe as a team that can exceed our MVP and produce a web application with additional functionalities.

During Part B presentations, the team asked for feedback on 3 major points. The points and respective criticisms have been detailed below:
  • Regarding the Twitter API – due to Twitter only providing seven days of trend data to users and no appropriate AJAX calls to receive a stream of tweets daily, the original Twitter column of ‘On This Day’ has been rendered as unable to be created. What would be a suitable substitute for this?
The users suggested a couple of substitutes for our column idea: replace it with a news API (might be easier and is still relevant to the website idea), getting Tweet data from just 1 Twitter account (maybe a Twitter 'On this day' account).
  • Regarding the colour scheme – initial research showed that the colour-per-column scheme drew attention to the design rather than the content so a neutral gradient scheme was decided upon. What do the users think of this scheme compared to the original design?
Users unanimously agreed that the neutral gradient scheme was easier on the eyes than the colour-per-column. The gradient helped the data stand out rather than the design.
  • Regarding the stories functionality – as of the demonstration date the current stories functionality displays all stories on the main page no matter the limit. Do users think this is appropriate or should only a selected limit be displayed with the remainder on an adjoining page?
Users thought it would be a good idea to have a separate page for all stories and only to display a couple of 'featured' stories on the main page.

With this part of the project completed, I feel like our team was able to communicate well in sharing problems and getting help. I for one was struggling with my tasks getting data from the Flickr and Twitter API's and received a substantial amount of help from the other members of the team to get the job done to a suitable level for the presentation. I feel like as the project progresses some members may have a lesser impact in the development of the application, simply due to other members being more skilled in the role. If this happens I think it would be suitable to let this happen, and instead have the lesser contributing members look over what is being done to make sure they understand. In addition to this these members make up for their lack of work in development by taking extra work in the connected report.

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