My team has been hard at work this term as we’ve been developing and submitting many versions of our OSU class registration software. I’ve been working on the user interface side, having completely finished all of the pages on Figma by adding in all of the navigation. I also began researching how to be create our user testing guides. Thankfully, I’m also in a psychology department UX course for my User Experience Research minor and the textbook has been very helpful in that regard. As of this blog post date, I’ve completed the user testing guide for participants self-administering the test remotely. My next goal to tackle this weekend is to create the in-person testing guide for when we conduct the tests for our participants. The goal is to make the two kinds of tests as similar as possible for accurate results!
On the other side of the team, two of my teammates are working together to help create the backend side of the website. They have been hard at work creating queries for every scenario of our search function. They’ve also created a high-level entity-relationship diagram to help us visualize the flow of the database. The next step is to create the database and fill it with our mock data. My other team member has been working on developing the front-end of the website. She’s been researching all of React’s nuances to make it look as similar as possible to my user interface on Figma. In this stage, we have been working together to match the two. As she codes, there are some things that are easier for her to code a certain way, or perhaps contribute to a more usable aesthetic. In this case, I adapt the Figma UI so that they are the same. For instance, she found that replacing a couple of our buttons with icons would be more efficient by eliminating wordy buttons with intuitive icons that users will instinctively identify. We plan to deploy user testing this coming week so that we can adapt our UI, run user testing again, and then finish development by adding our improvements.
With all of this progress in mind, we have been learning how to use many different technologies! On my user interface side, I have been working closely with Figma. It is by far my favorite technology for creating high-fidelity mockups. I have enjoyed getting to learn all of its nuances and have definitely filed my own complaints about it. It was a difficult learning curve at first, but now that I know how to use it, I can appreciate just how powerful it can be. On the database side of things, my team has favored SQL queries for our website. Because of this, we will be using a database such as MariaDB since it works with SQL, whereas with MongoDB, we would have to use JSON queries, which is not the strong suit of any team members. We have each used SQL pretty extensively and favor it. On the development side of things, we are using HTML, CSS, and React. It has been a bit of a learning curve with React as most of us have had some experience, but there are lots of features on our website that we are wanting to include. I now have an appreciation for the depth of React that I didn’t have before.
I’m looking forward to seeing just how far our team can get now that we’re halfway through the term. We still have more technology to tackle as we figure out how to deploy our website. We have several options selected for our domain and for hosting our website, but are currently at a loss for where to host our database. This is new territory for all of us, but we are hard at work this term as we blaze our trail.
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