Week 11 - finalising our project

The project is nearly complete and we have been contacted by Jack advising he is in Alice Springs!

This means several sections are not complete!

Having other courses will probably mean we will have to sacrifice some work to complete others.

Pretty disappointing.

So the Google API zoom in/out features need to be sorted out.

CSS is still not where it needs to be.

That being said, the site is looking pretty good.

Final Project

Well we got it done, maybe not everything we wanted to do, but it's done!

Here is a screen shot:

We were able to provide a help function and social media sharing using the FB authentication.  We were also able to show a graph for the year scrolling bar, which indicates where the majority of results might be.

However, the piece of Javascript that works amazing is the pie graph breaking down where the news report is coming from.  This makes the whole searching far more interesting that we could of thought of!

In summary, it's a shame we lost a team member for the last 4 weeks, we really didn't see that coming.  When you are reliant on someone to keep their end of the bargain and they don't do it, it's a real shame.  The lesson here is that we should of held him accountable as per the team charter and we didn't.  Had we done that, we would of found out earlier that he had left University study altogether and could of progressed more in the project.

Week 10 - what we need to do next

After the break, as a team we haven't heard from Jack at all.  Several major sections assigned to him are not done and concern is starting to creep in when we will here from him.

After doing the paper prototyping and seeing the feedback from that, as a team there are some tasks still required as follows:

1.  The concept is of interest
2.  Our paper prototype was useful and engaging as the concept is
3.  People are still unclear about how to get search results
4.  People found that the statistics bar which we hadn't created was of great interest
5.  The year timeline scroll bar was of interest

As a team of now 3, we talked about still getting the logo in place, as it wasn't.  I worked with Dan to place the logo in the search area, right at the very top.  We worked on creating greater "space" within the CSS as well.  

Week 9 - Paper prototypes & our progress report

Well we are so far ahead at this point, we could nearly submit this concept as a final work.

This reflects on the hard work we did in the first 5 weeks!

Having everyone see our progress so far has really impressed people, but again, they provide little to zero feedback.

I created a survey for people to respond to for feedback, here is what it looked like:

Here is the feedback we got:

Week 8 - Progress has been made

Building up the documentation for the Progress report was left to Jack and myself, however Jack seems pretty distant and not engaging in any work.

I get the feeling that maybe Jack isn't interested in the course, noted from his lack of input to date.  Great guy, but clearly distracted and has interests elsewhere.

I put together a document for the team to input into for the progress report and provided most of the content.

Working with Hanson on some errors he is getting with scripting, but honestly, I'm only helping with the obvious, I guess it's handy having a second set of eyes on your code.

Week 7 - the quiet week

The team energy is slowing down dramatically, but I suspect that's mostly to do with the fact we have mostly completed our final project.

I worked on some Javascript, but nothing anywhere near as good as what Hanson has done.  Being a 4th year IT student working on AI, I couldn't even begin to produce what he is doing.

It makes me reflect in how I need to improve my coding skills.

I learnt in the workshop in the nature of Javascipting, the Trove API call in specific.  In how Javascript calls all the information at once and there is no set order.  This is the problem we are facing in trying to get better search results.

Week 6 - critiquing & concept progress

Working with the team, we discussed many elements of the structure of the site.  I was running team meetings and leading discussion on design.

Hanson lead the discussion on the coding side.

We decided on the following direction:

1.  Call all the results in from the Trove API call upon searching and limit it to 500 results.
2.  Limit the Google API map, for max zoom out and max zoom in.
3.  Current CSS theming was not in line with original concept work

After last weeks session of critiquing others works, I felt like the quality of the critiques I gave were high quality and would enable others to see some areas of opportunity.

However, the quality of feedback from others towards our concept, was very limited and even after strong encouragement to provide any feedback, we really didn't receive enough quality feedback.

I think the lesson here is to maybe have rewards such as lollies and sweets to really encourage the feedback.  I think also our progress was well in advance to others and maybe other students were a little put off on the fact we were so far ahead.