This week in development

This week was one of sealing up any major holes in our app that needed to be addressed based on the pitch and also on things we promised to have done by the end of the project. The thing that I addressed this week among other things was completing the scoring and ranking system for users of our application. Another thing I worked on was linked the missions to the wizards and also trying to build the story that we are trying to tell the user when the use our application. At this point, the main thing I am concerned with is story of G.E.R.A. and the struggle that the user is a part of when they play or app. I think this innovative approach to gathering user information is the biggest selling point of our application and creating a cool story is what will hopefully win over the crowd.

User Testing

One of the goals for this week, aside from getting the remaining features implemented and partially tested, was to have some people use the app. So far I have shown my app to a few friends and had them create accounts and log in to the live site. This was very enlightening for several reason and slightly change some of the development we did this week. During the testing, I encountered some bugs that we needed to address and I think we got all of the ones that were observed during that first user test. Some other things that were brought to light was how we were presenting the information to people. This topic was touched on a bit during the pitch as well. Specifically, that the missions lead directly to the wizard without any context for what the purpose of the mission is with respect the the story that the application is suppose to be delivering to people.

In all, I would say that we got a lot of valuable information with the first few user tests and I am hoping that between now and our next pitch day, that we will have some more user tests that will be able to help bring to light any short comings that we night need to address. Unfortunately, with only a few weeks left in the semester, any issues that we address must be almost exclusively aesthetic since nothing else should really be changed in terms of implemented features.

Pitch Reaction

Overall, I felt my pitch went quite well. Some of the good things I took away from peoples reaction were mainly that I need to smooth it over a bit. One thing that I also received suggestions on was having some kind of visual aid to go along with my presentation. I absolutely agree with the general consensus on my pitch.

Some things I have planned to do in preparation for the next pitch is to continue practicing it and memorizing it so that I will come out more fluidly and genuinely. It seems to me that the most compelling speakers I have seen appear so comfortable in the situation almost casual but in a very professional way.

One other thing I definitely need to do is make slides that I can practice with someone on my team. This way people have something to follow more easily. I might start off with just black and white slides and some large bullet points that will be important for prospective investors to follow. This way, I can tighten up my pitch while adding a visual element other than the live demo. This will hopefully get people more receptive to my suggestions about why our app is awesome.

I plan to have some themed slides for the final pitch that way to but a nice polish on everything. I also thing that David and Justin have some good ideas about the live demo so that will also be cool.

Preparing for the pitch

For the pitched, I decided to build it around the "goldilocks" method. In the intro I identify a problem that should be addressed in some way and can hopefully be solved in software. Then I describe similar software that are out there. I am careful to make a distinction that there are actually two different categories of software whose goal is to bring awareness to people about their impact on climate change. I note good and bad qualities about both, then point out how our software, while similar to both kinds of climate change related software, is very different in that it bring together the "best of both worlds". I plan to go into a bit of detail about what our software is and does and about the story that the software attempts the get the user involved in. After that, Justin will do a basic demo of the application, highlighting various features. We have rehearsed the pitch a few times so hopefully things will go relatively smooth on Monday.

I also hope that people will give us good constructive criticism so that we can make the application even better.

This week in GERA

This week was pretty busy in terms of getting things ready not only for the client meeting, but also for getting ready for our pitch on Monday. We addressed quite a bit of the user experience issues that were pointed out in previous meetings. This week consisted of implementing and polishing some of the ux stuff like the points system and also creating more of a story and point that will make the user want to continue using the application. This was done by making missions that the user is expected to complete. These missions simply correspond to doing things with in the application like filling in data for the first time or at all, for filling in data that are from previous months, and for improving there overall footprint which means decreasing the amount of carbon the emit in a given period of time. Certain missions are only available to users of a high enough rank. Once they reach this rank, a new mission is unlocked and they can then proceed to collect a point value for that particular mission.

This will not be demo-ed in any significant way during the pitch as it is still in a very early stage of development and demoing it a few days after its design would be a bad idea. However the majority of the sight will be demo-ed during the pitch.

Website Redesign

Introduction

The big thing I worked on in the week leading up to the client meeting with Nikan was website flow and user experience. I decided that since the website is based around gamifying carbon emissions tracking, the theme should be consistent with this vision. After talking with my group members about this, we all agreed that this would be a good idea for several reason. However, because of this redesign, there will be some other issues to overcome that I image Dave will address in this week client meeting. I part of this week has been, in addition to implementing the guiders and making the user experience more enjoyable, I have been trying to think of ways that we can justify or redesign to Ackley in the hopes that we wont be caught quite as unprepared as we were with our most recent meeting with him.
The following sections will describe some of the potential pros and cons to the redesign we have implemented in the hopes that we can find a good way to justify the redesign.

Redesign Pros

The user experience will be much better because, not only does the new theme work well with this, but also because we now have something that an audience will hopefully be able to better identify themselves with.

Redesign Cons

The theme is one in which you become part of an alliance to combat the evil "Big Petroleum" by tracking your carbon emissions. Because of this theme, and the artwork, it may be the case that we are now marketing to a niche group and will therefore not as accessible to some users.

Conclusion

Leading up to this client meeting, we have decided that it is important for us to meet up and present. It is likely that I will be presenting most of it since I am in a sense the letter and that seems to be the group consensus, however, we will all be participating in the practice presentation process, while simultaneously attempting to address these and other issues as we come across them. Hopefully this added preparation will be beneficial. I imagine it's better than doing nothing though.

Action Item

During the client meeting, one thing that Nikan pointed out that Dave had already addressed with the flow issue. One of the major issues we are having with our application is the user experience (UX). David Lochridge had mention something about using the guider.js API to enhance the users experience and I agreed that was something we should consider.

Since I have been in charge of the flow of the website I proposed being responsible for that and as such that was my task for this week. I did run into some issues about how to allow anonymous user to be guided through basic site navigation without having the guider popups continuously pop up every time a user went to a different page. Today I did manage to get things figured out and now it is a matter of styling the guides appropriately with the theme of the website, which we actually ended up redesigning quite considerable.

In my next blog, I will discuss exactly what that redesign consisted of and why we thought it appropriate to do so.