Week 5 — MVP
Ladies and gentleman we have a minimum viable product! This past week we showed our MVP to the class.
Based on that demo here are all the things we need to add:
- On boarding experience — show the users how to use the app the first time around
- About this app section
- An app icon
- Perhaps a need for a map to show all of the sites at the beginning. We will investigate this further during our usability tests next week.
- Select all sites button
Things that went wrong in creating our MVP:
- Contact with Medford Historical Society and City of Medford
Medford Historical Society is run entirely by volunteers and is only open once a week. So, our communication with them is a slow process. We were waiting for photos from them of each of our sites, while we were waiting we used placeholder items. When one of the photos were forgotten, we temporarily took the site off of our map. They also asked us to sign consent forms to use these photos. The form said that it would cost $25 per image. We have now clarified with them that we will be able to use the image at no cost.
The Medford Historical Society also provided us with walking tour brochures. We’d assumed that the brochures were created by the Historical Society, but it turned out that they had been created by the City of Medford Walking Routes Taskforce. We wanted to use some of the historical information in the brochures, as they were relevant to the sites in our app, so we had to call the City of Medford for permission.
Lesson learned: Read the fine print and follow-up!
2. Recycler View
We were originally using a staggered list recycler view for ~aesthetic~ reasons. However, it meant that we had to implement selecting these images on our own. This gave us a lot of trouble and seemed to be getting unnecessarily complicated for a simple function that we wanted to implement. So, we switched to the simple grid-view where it would handle most of the selection for us. When we did this, our scrolling functionality became buggy. We decided that it was more important to implement selecting the sites than to smoothly scroll through the sites and we will work on fixing that issue before our release to the app store.
Lesson learned: Don’t overcomplicate and compromise.
3. Navigation
In our app we wanted the ability to allow the user to select different modes of transportation i.e. walking or biking and we would display appropriate turn by turn directions based on that. Mapbox had this wonderful drop in turn-by-turn navigation UI that we could use in our app by just specifying a start and end location and their SDK would take care of the rest. Of course nothing is really that easy. From our understanding and after digging through their github issues and posting questions on stack overflow in the current drop in navigation ui API there isn’t a way to specify options like walking directions vs biking directions or to hook on to specific events like when the user has reached their final destination. So to get the functionality we want we need to use a collection of their apis and ui building blocks to piece together the interaction experience with navigation we want. For now we have driving directions and more information about each historical site is displayed once you close the navigation.
Lesson learned: Sometimes you have to DIY to fit your specific needs.
4. Color
The color palette we originally chose was very light and fell outside of Material Design specifications, so we we tried generating palettes using material.io/color/ instead. It’s a helpful tool for visualizing color in an app and also allows you to export an XML file, which you can put directly into your Android Studio project.
We quickly chose a more accessible palette for our app.
Lesson learned: Sometimes it’s better not to reinvent the wheel.
Looking Forward
On November 13, we will present our app to a local group called WalkMedford. WalkMedford advocates for a more walking-friendly community. Projects and initiatives have included advancing Medford’s Complete Streets policy, advocating for the Clippership Connector path project, improving snow shoveling, and developing maps, web content, and wayfinding signs for the city.
They’re interested in getting involved or learning more about our project. We feel that they’ll have very useful feedback and we’re very excited to meet them in the coming weeks!
