Weekly Sprint #7: Group Critique
I spent most of this week considering the feedback from last week’s group critique. Much of the feedback that I have received on the project so far has been positive, but recent comments have made me re-consider the direction of the project. One of the biggest criticisms is that there are limited incentives for users to migrate their content from traditional social media platforms (such as Instagram or Flickr) to FoldFeed.
I am considering focusing more on the educational aspects of FoldFeed as opposed to the social media aspects. Instead of posting photos into a comprehensive feed, users would instead upload diagrams or link to YouTube tutorials. Other users would then be able to download these instructions and post photos of their rendition of the designs. This concept also has potential when comes to designers looking for folders to test their diagrams.
Instead of shifting my focus and re-designing FoldFeed this week, I started implementing video content to the feed. While creating a photo post, users now have the ability to input a YouTube id which is used to dynamically retrieve the thumbnail (and could potentially pull other video data with the YouTube API).
Additionally, I experimented with AngularJS and built a simple artist directory web application. The application pulls data from a JSON file and updates a list of artists according to a set of filters and sorting methods. It was interesting to implement these functionalities in Angular as opposed to React (which I am using for the current FoldFeed prototype).
Next week, I will continue working on video integration to make the process as seamless as possible. I will also look into uploading and displaying PDF documents so that the website supports origami diagrams.
