Labs Journal, Part 2
This is a continuation of an edited/condensed version of my labs journal I had to complete for Lambda School. We were working on an 8 week, cross-functional team to start building a sign language learning app.
QUESTION: Describe the features in your first release canvas. How do the features in your first release canvas support one another? How will the completion of the first release canvas help drive the technological decisions moving forward?
ANSWER: For our first release canvas, we are focusing on the following features: a landing page (which at this point is really just the signup form — the UX designer may or may not add add an overview of the app later, after she does more user research), signup/login forms and a sign out button, as well as a dashboard, which, in this release cycle will pretty much just serve as a visual confirmation to the user that they have logged in successfully. All of these features comprise the onboarding process.
As far as the technology, after some debate amongst the front end developers, we decided to use Redux over Context API to manage state. The proponents of using Redux (myself among them), believed that Redux will allow future programmers of SignLingo to scale more easily. The app will certainly grow; during these eight weeks, we are building the app from scratch. The curriculum will be limited to the alphabet. Once more complex language features are taught in the app, there will be much more data to manage that will allow users to do more complex things, like interact with one another, for starters. Redux, although more tedious to set up, will allow for smoother scaling.
QUESTION: Summarize what you included in your first release canvas and why the features in that release canvas create a complete feature set. How will you test those features to know that they actually solve the problem?
ANSWER: The landing page, signup/login/logout features, and dashboard all belong in the same feature set because they serve as the onboarding process. We are the first team of programmers working on SignLingo and therefore have to build the app from the ground up.
To test the efficacy of these features, the UX Designer will conduct user research. We will consider them successful if 75% of the users are able to successfully complete the onboarding process, without outside influence. If they do so, it will suggest to us that the app is easy to navigate and the workflow is convenient and successful. Currently, our release canvas also states that we will measure the success of the landing page if 75% of the users are able to summarize what SingLingo offers. But that research will only be conducted if our UX Designer decides to proceed with a more involved landing page (i.e. is more than a sign up form). This decision will come after she has more time to prototype.
