Alexa Bishes — Day 1 Design Processes
On Monday, 18th February our team came together for the first time. We would have two weeks to produce our final project at Makers and present it to the World on Friday 1st March. We didn’t know what we wanted to build for our final project, but we were united around a concept: Alexa is freakin’ cool!
So we locked ourselves in a room with a whiteboard to break the concept down and create a challenging but viable final project idea… Then we got kicked out of the room, so we moved to another one #MakersLife.
Stage 1
Our first design board is the one pictured at the top of this article, it wasn’t especially well-organised but it helped break down our initial ideas and existing knowledge of the Alexa development process.
You can see we tossed around board games and dice apps with a quiz being first mentioned at this point. We also drew our first request-response cycle from the user to Alexa to AWS and back, and suggested some initial learning resources.
We also had a lengthy debate about which programming language to use that continued throughout the day, we were all keen to learn something new but wanted to balance that against what we could realistically learn alongside the Alexa development platform.
Stage 2
At the beginning of stage 2 we had settled on creating a quiz app for Alexa, with the potential to integrate a web app that would move players based on scoring correct or incorrect answers.
We used an agile, incremental approach throughout our planning stage, settling on idea in three stages, each building upon the last but serving as complete products if we weren’t able to complete all three in the time-scale:
- MVP — An Alexa Quiz App
- Product Goal — An Alexa Quiz App with a separate board game that players manually move their pieces on
- Stretch Goal — Integrating the board game with the Alexa Quiz App so that it would automatically update player scores and move them based on responses from the Alexa server
Agile Working
We also outlined our agile working process during this stage. As you can see in the photo, we settled on daily stand-ups with an informal check-in after lunch and retros at the end of each sprint.
We all value team communication highly and decided that sitting together whenever possible and staying in contact on Slack would also ensure a smooth working process.
Stage 3
With our MVP, stretch goals and working process laid out, we took the time to map out the user story for the Quiz Game App and the request response cycle throughout.
The above photo shows our process, which has helped guide us throughout the creation of the initial app this week.
With the design process out of the way it was time to begin learning and building. Wish us luck!
