Hitting the Control Key, Developing Yippy!
In all honesty, I had always preferred working alone when it came to programming. I assumed that the lack of distractions, which comes with individual work, would generate the best ideas.
However, I quickly learned that I was wrong. With teamwork, my mindset of the lone-wolf was dramatically pivoted. It is clear to me now that an important part of becoming a software engineer is to build a product in a team environment. This is especially crucial if the product involves a social aspect.
Henceforth, I invite you to come along as I guide you through a collective journey for a social media app I worked on with my partner. We decided to name it Yippy and we believe it displays the better aspects of what I learned from this process: collaboration. I will be going over our idea, sprint planning & retrospectives, our biggest challenges while working together, and how we overcame them. To conclude, I will end the process by showcasing our user-testing experience.
Our Idea
First and foremost, allow me to ask you this: Who do you normally go to for suggestions in discovering a new establishment? If you are the social creature known as a human being, your answer is most likely your friends and family. This is exactly the goal of our app. We strived to create a platform where you can see what the closest people in your life truly thinks about certain establishments. We call it Yippy and it is geared to help consumers gain access to the most real and honest reviews from the people they trust the most.
Strangers or friends: Who’s opinion would you trust more?
With our app, you can view all the establishments your friends have visited and view their opinions of the place. Our goal is to help users get an honest insight into establishments they might want to consider going themselves. Following through on a project of this scale or magnitude requires strict planning and multiple iterations. To help me and my partner flow through this project, we went through the process of Sprint Planning & Retrospectives to make the progress of our project flow more consistently.
Sprint Planning & Retrospectives
To plan out and complete a project of this stature, we went with a Sprint Planning method. Sprint Planning is setting a period of time to achieve many critical engineering tasks. We’ve utilized this method to prioritize features and bugs, scale-out how long it might take to complete a task and any other team-related issues. After conducting Sprint Planning, we then go into our Sprint Retrospectives. We discussed any team issues that arose and add new “tickets” to the backlog. This gives us time to reflect on what we have accomplished and iterate what was needed. Many engineering teams use these two methods to help keep a collaborative project moving forward at a consistent pace.
We structured our sprints to be effective by using the following format:
- Plan out features
- Appoint who does which task
- Scale how long it might take
- Pair Program
- When/Where to meet next time
- BREAK — OFF
The most valuable skill I learned from doing Sprint Planning is how to effectively use your time together in a team. Not once did I feel we were not progressing through our project. My partner and I improved on both our soft and technical skills. We communicated with each other thoroughly and held each other reasonably accountable. Since we were about the same level in our technical skills, the experience provided valuable learning moments and opportunities to level up simultaneously.
Evidently, though, it was not smooth sailing all around. We had our hiccups and challenges along the way working as a team, however, we addressed these issues as soon as possible during our retrospectives.
Challenges & Iterations
I will admit, tackling a project this large in scale really challenged our technical skills. We were not fully stacked to create a Social Media app but did find ways to take on this challenge with an open mind.
Challenge 1: It was quite difficult to organize which tasks belonged to the each of us and determining what had to be done. Fortunately, we stumbled upon GitHub projects. GitHub projects allow us to create tickets on what needs to be done directly in our project repository. This tool provided immense help with our organization for the project.
Challenge 2: One other pressing issue we had during the creation of our project was not holding each other accountable for tasks as much as we should have. We would sometime let each other slack off on a certain task. We did eventually overcome this issue by just communicating this to each other and setting each other up to be more accountable.
Overall, all good teamwork comes with hardships. We understood the problem at hand and iterated. However, when it comes to having good iterations, we conducted user testing to take our app to the next level.
User Testing
To get more insight on executing our UI/UX skills, we conducted user tests on our fellow peers. We begin user testing by giving a prototype version of our app to the test taker. Some things we carefully analyzed was how the user navigated through our app without almost any context going in. We examine what they did and where they got stuck or confused. It was especially helpful when the test taker would vocally express their thoughts.
Wrapping Up
With the conclusion of our user testing, we gained a tremendous amount of insight with our application. The main issue that the test takers were encountering related to UI/UX issues. A lot of the tested were not clear on what do. It was one of the most eye-opening realizations we were presented with. Our app had to speak for itself to the user and guide them along the process of utilizing the app. One eye-opening factor that I witnessed during the user testing was typography hierarchy. We discovered that users are more inclined to input the location of the establishment first then the title of the review. All in all, this concludes my overall experience working on a project with my partner. Please take the time to read my fellow partners article on the UI/UX design of our app.
