Easter presentation + new planning

During the easter holidays I and the other students of our group had our second thesis presentation. My presentation can be found here.

Although less than at the presentations in december we received some helpful feedback. Most important was the further planning since we are at a crucial time in our thesis work. I myself have decided, in accordance with my supervisors, to delay my planning. This is because I have a couple of other courses that involve projects, and I will probably not get my thesis text finished in time. After all, if I have to rush it,  not only the quality of both my implementation and thesis text will suffer from it, but also all the work for other courses. So here is my new planning:

• 26/04 - 02/05: thesis poster
• 03/05 - 09/05: adding KUL timetables to the application
• 10/05 - 16/05: adding KUL events to the application
• 17/05 - 23/05: pc room reservations, favorites
• 24:05 - 30/05: evaluation
• 31/05 - 30/06: exams
• 01/07 - 15/07: thesis text ch. 2 literature study
• 16/07 - 22/07: thesis text ch. 3 analysis
• 23/07 - 05/08: thesis text ch. 4 implementation
• 06/08 - 12/08: thesis text ch. 5 evaluation
• 13/08 - 19/08: thesis text ch. 1 intro + ch. 6 conclusion

The reason I take 2 weeks for chapter 2 is to anticipate on problems for getting started, don't knowing how to get started, what to write exactly. The reason for 2 weeks for chapter 4 is because that one will be a big chapter. Furthermore, the intro and conclusion are chapters that should grow throughout writing the other chapters. The deadline is 24/08 so I have foreseen a couple of days at the end for adjusting the final text. Off course, I will try to finish the text faster than according to this planning.

Progress update

I haven't written anything on my blog for the past 2 months.
This is mainly because I am focusing on the implementation of the application, and have lost sight of my blog.

What have I done in the past 2 months?
Well first of all, I have written a scientific paper about the application. This paper can be found here.
Second, I started implementing the application for Android. The implementation will be done in 3 iterations which are each followed by an evaluation.

I have completed the first iteration along with it's evaluation. This first iteration focused mainly on the design of the graphical user interface. Almost the entire application was designed, all with hardcoded data. This design was then evaluated by 4 persons aged 18 to 25. The evaluation was done on an actual device, from the computer science department. The test persons had some time to explore the application shortly after which I asked them about their general impression. These are the results of the evaluation:

• For some screens, it was unclear that some text fields, input boxes, etc. were clickables leading them to an other screen.
• At the screens where I used tab widgets, it was unclear which tab was the selected one.
• Some screens had too many buttons, forcing users to do unnecessary extra work.



Choosing bad colors

• There was some inconsistency regarding the buttons. Since Android smartphones have a back button on the device itself, users can simply go back to the previous screen by clicking this device button. On some screens I added an extra cancel/back button, but not for all screens. The test persons advised me to either add them everywhere, or either nowhere, forcing users to use the device button.

Too many buttons

The first two remarks were mainly caused by choosing bad colors for the screens.

The last two remarks were caused by bad, inconsistent design of the graphical user interface.

Furthermore, since I only got the device shortly before the evaluations and didn't have time to test it myself, it showed that the buttons, text, etc. were too small when shown on the screen of the device.

At the moment I am working on the second iteration: fixing first iteration issues, adding a Google map, building locations, route information, a check-in functionality along with buddy locations (by integrating with Facebook, Foursquare and others). I will post more on this when I finish the second iteration and it's evaluation.