Why did you and your team choose the technologies you did?

After talking with my team, we realized that all our experience was roughly the same when it came to the project at hand. We were to design a cross-platform mobile app without any experience. With this in mind, I tried to research what options were available for beginner mobile developers who needed to make an app compatible with both iOS and Android devices. I was able to find React Native and Expo. I went ahead and watched a few tutorials, so that when we were going to have our initial group meetign we could discuss technologies. Everyone was in consensus that React Native made the most sense.

Things started to fall into place once we had our UI figured out. Given that we only had to store data for bikes and users, it made the most sense to use a familiar non-relational database, that being MongoDb. I harped on choosing technologies that the team had used, since we had a lot to learn for the UI and map integration services. Additionally, working as a ULA for Web Development set me up well with these tools and there was no strong preference for other tech to be used.

What do you like or dislike about your system UI/UX?

React Native is simple to get started with, and offers a lot of flexibility in the pre-built libraries for different icons/widgets. Expo allows simple access to camera and location services, which are crucial for our application. Additionally, these components have preset styles specific to the platform they run on, meaning that although the apps may look slightly different, we can assure their functionality will be nearly identical. On the flip side, to design a cohesive app this means we need to set specific styles per page, which can be a lot when you are used to setting up global styles due to experience in web development.

What do you like or dislike about your design modularity? Does it enable each of your to work independently?

Going off what was said above, each screen will be unique in its layout, and although having a cohesive style/branding is ideal, it will be difficult to implement in practice. I think this may be a challenge to working independently, as we each design our screens. I believe the best way to tackle this is by making basic screens and refining their styles later on.