The major achievements this quarter include usability test and further improvements to the application that we have been working on as per the feedback received. Another highlights would include the participation of Lindsey and Alex in two conferences the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference and the Posters on the Hill Conference.
We conducted a usability tests on a sample of our target audience in the early weeks of this quarter. It helped us get insight to few areas of our development work like the UI elements as well as the gestures that are used for accessing the application. We found out from the test that most of the users preferred the "pinch to zoom" gesture to "tap to zoom" while zooming in and zooming out the lecture screen area. Also we got some feedback regarding some of the icons that we had used. Most of the participants expressed their confidence that the application would indeed be very helpful to them in their classroom setting provided few modification made. Most of the participants expressed their concern regarding lecture note-box area which is used for writing notes related to the lecture. Whenever the user presses the take notes button a note-box pops onto the screen covering almost 20% which reduces the lecture view area.
Taking few of these feedback we have already started working on some of them like changing few of the icons as well as allowing the user to actually take notes (using stylus) right on top of the lecture screens and saved it. From the usability test, we also found out that the use of keyboards both inbuilt and external presented their specific inconveniences; so we are planning to test out with the use of stylus for the next testing. Also we have been working on features like allowing the user to to select different colors in which they can scribble notes.
We would be extending these work over the summer quarter and we hope to get a lot done then as Lindey and Alex would be working as full-time.
--
Abhishek
Friday, May 20, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Progress before the school year ends
Hey everyone!
I mentioned in my last post that we were planning on wrapping up a couple of little things with the app before the school year ended. While we will be continuing work over summer, we will be off from work for 2 weeks so we wanted to leave off at a good point.
This week we reworked a lot of the icons to make them easier to distinguish (i.e. making certain icons thicker and removing gradients from icons since they made the icons more difficult to understand when inverted). Abhishek worked on making a test application where you can take notes using a stylus, and this week we were able to integrate it with our project. We added a navigation system so that the user would be able to open different pages of the application. While we were changing to application to be navigation based we were able to refactor it a bit and clean up a lot of the messy stuff that ended up sneaking it's way in over time. We were also able to make sure that the code was documented as well. Since we will be off from the project for a while before we start up again over summer, it's important that the code is readable and easy to understand, so that was another priority before the school year ended.
Finally, we wanted to remove the tap zooming which our usability test subjects found unintuitive and conflicting with other applications gestures. The app no longer has support for the tap zooming, and we're working on salvaging some of that logic to use for the zoom in and zoom out buttons. At first we were expecting it to be very simple to reuse the code, but we've since realized that without the gestures to send locations to your zooming methods it can actually be difficult until you figure out how to pinpoint the coordinates you need to work with. We've all taken a couple shots at figuring out how to calculate the numbers we need but so far we've been unsuccessful; however, since we've finished everything else we wanted to work on before summer started, we will have all of next week to devote to tackling this problem.
We'll post next week to summarize the work we've done over the past quarter, and where we were able to leave off on. And then in a couple more weeks we'll start regularly posting updates again!
-Lindsey
I mentioned in my last post that we were planning on wrapping up a couple of little things with the app before the school year ended. While we will be continuing work over summer, we will be off from work for 2 weeks so we wanted to leave off at a good point.
This week we reworked a lot of the icons to make them easier to distinguish (i.e. making certain icons thicker and removing gradients from icons since they made the icons more difficult to understand when inverted). Abhishek worked on making a test application where you can take notes using a stylus, and this week we were able to integrate it with our project. We added a navigation system so that the user would be able to open different pages of the application. While we were changing to application to be navigation based we were able to refactor it a bit and clean up a lot of the messy stuff that ended up sneaking it's way in over time. We were also able to make sure that the code was documented as well. Since we will be off from the project for a while before we start up again over summer, it's important that the code is readable and easy to understand, so that was another priority before the school year ended.
Finally, we wanted to remove the tap zooming which our usability test subjects found unintuitive and conflicting with other applications gestures. The app no longer has support for the tap zooming, and we're working on salvaging some of that logic to use for the zoom in and zoom out buttons. At first we were expecting it to be very simple to reuse the code, but we've since realized that without the gestures to send locations to your zooming methods it can actually be difficult until you figure out how to pinpoint the coordinates you need to work with. We've all taken a couple shots at figuring out how to calculate the numbers we need but so far we've been unsuccessful; however, since we've finished everything else we wanted to work on before summer started, we will have all of next week to devote to tackling this problem.
We'll post next week to summarize the work we've done over the past quarter, and where we were able to leave off on. And then in a couple more weeks we'll start regularly posting updates again!
-Lindsey
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