We wanted to do a crowdsourced deadlines aggregator for Assignment 3. It would be organized by modules, with students contributing deadlines for individual modules. By tying it to their school accounts, student’s would be held accountable for what they posted, thereby minimizing fake or spammy posts (unless they were okay with their reputation being ruined).

Front-end UI

For Assignment 3, Ten was in charge of UI, but this was a new experience for him, plus he had little to no experience with Angular. This meant that (1) he had to pick up Angular and (2) he had to ‘learn design’ in the span of the two to three weeks we had for this assignment. In the first two weeks, the UI was (sorry Ten) really hideous and not suited for public consumption. It improved greatly in the last week before submission, but this also meant that we chose to give up many features we planned to implement.

Backend Implementation

Hanming has plenty of web development experience, and was able to spearhead both the backend implementation, as well as integrate the frontend and backend components. A lot of features were quietly done up really quickly by Hanming. Towards the end, I realised I had only done up simple features like login with IVLE, and implementing ServiceWorkers to make our app a Progressive Web App.

Progressiveness

There was a lot I could have done better in this aspect. During Assignment 3, I had about 3 to 4 days to get ServiceWorkers working, with a greater focus on quickly attaining a minimally viable product rather than making things easier for users. For example, we limited deadline adding to online users, and prevented users from adding deadlines when they were offline. If we really wanted users to have the best experience, it might have made more sense to allow them to just add the deadline, with us perform some kind of syncing whenever they got online.

Getting Users

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, I wanted my students to try the app. I wasn’t looking to do heavy user testing; I just wanted get some feedback.

What I learnt from them was that the entire idea of having synced deadlines wasn’t obvious when they used the app (apparently people don’t read splash pages when you ask them to try your app). I was thinking of mitigating this by adding one of those instructional walkthroughs when a user first uses your app. But due to time constraints, and having other milestones to hit, we decided to put this on the backburner.

Overall Thoughts

In general, I feel that the app would have a lot of potential as a native mobile application, with notifications about upcoming deadlines. In terms of usage, I think that cooperation with teaching staff is vital (because they are the most reliable information source). If they were willing to disseminate information through Schoolines, it could be the factor that propels the app to unimaginable success. (Y)