Our project has come so far in the last nine weeks. We went from a bare bones user interface and no database to an almost polished product. We’ve pioneered through database queries, entity relationship diagrams, design and function struggles, countless development sessions, Figma pages, and user testing. Throughout the entire process, I am most proud of my team’s communication, teamwork, and our ability to utilize each others’ strong suits.
One of the most intriguing parts about our team is that we never elected a leader. We worked and discussed as a team. In our first Sprint Meeting, we laid out all of the tasks that remained for the term and we each took responsibility of them, based on our strengths. It proved to be a very effective plan of attack, reflecting on all that we have conquered this term. One of our most difficult challenges is one that we still have yet to conquer is how to make it accessible. Currently, we are forced to run it locally. Finding a website to publish our website is simple enough, but finding a way to publish a database that our website can fetch from is proving to be quite difficult. This is something we hope to tackle next term so that anyone can try it out for themselves!
Our project has proven to be exactly what we set out for it to be, and even more so. We have a completely functional front end, the design being the result of many hours spent on Figma. This was my role in the project. I created, almost singlehanded, the entire UI pages on Figma. My teammates would review them and request or make changes themselves. Once we had a pretty solid picture of our desired end product, my teammates got to work developing the front end and creating the database. The latter took a long time. It took our team around an hour and a half to synchronously work out an entity relationship diagram. However, once we had that mapped out, my teammates could form the queries and CRUD statements. Currently, we are building up the database and finalizing the queries to fill out the front-end.
During all of this, I continued forward by designing our two methods of user testing: in-person, and self administered. I created guides to be followed that doubled as answer forms. Once we completed the tests, I compiled all of the answers. I sorted out Figma-specific complaints and then determined what all we could improve upon. I carefully thought out and listed some action items for review. I then implemented those in Figma. I duplicated the pages that needed improvement and created sample pages. My team has chosen to implement a few of those off of the bat, but we will look over the remainder of them this week. We were pleasantly surprised to find that we had little to no functionality issues crop up in our user testing. The majority of it was design issues that needed more clarity. Ultimately, they are easy-to-fix problems that we can implement quickly. This is a massive success. Our initial goal was to create a more user-friendly, student-centered website. I believe that we have done just that.
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