Week 8: Deploying the App!
We launched our app on the Google Play Store. Check it out here!
Meeting with Community Members
Before we launched our app, we had a meeting with some important folks. We went to Walk Medford’s community meeting where they discussed different community initiatives to engage citizens in walking, biking, and exploring Medford. We went and presented our app MVP, showing them about your initiatives to engage Tufts students with the surrounding community. Here’s a summary of our feedback from them:
“Great, we don’t see enough of Tufts students around here. The City of Medford is not accessible to Tufts students and we haven’t done enough to reach them either.”
- We are addressing a need through our app!
- They would like to see the app available on iOS devices. We would too. Unfortunately, that is not in the scope of our project. We could invest in finding someone to take over the project, but as of now, we are planning to hand the app off to Medford Historical Society.
- They gave us other links to add more sites to our app.
- We should add the distance and time it would take to each of the sites.
- Cheeseballs from Wegmans are great.
App Updates
Last week, we did a usability study. Based off of that, we decided to make some changes to our app. Our largest problem was the lack of an on boarding experience. So, Rebecca added an introduction at the beginning to guide users through our app. We also decided to get rid of our site selection screen because we realized that it wasn’t very informative; it didn’t tell the user what the site was, where it was, or how far away the sites are from each other and the user. We thought it would be much clearer for the user to go straight to the map view, where they can see where each of the sites are and then pick where to go. Monusrat worked on making that happen this week and added an about page about the app. Anna added more sites to the app.
Lesson learned: Sometimes you have to let go of your hard work because the product has to adapt to better fit the user’s needs!
Deployment
Hurray!
Deployment also means we had to have a viable working product and we had to make some compromises. Things we wish we could have worked on:
- When you click on a site on the map, that card shows up
- The app keeps tabs of which sites you’ve been on somehow, so the user doesn’t have to scroll through the entire list to figure out where to go to next
- That Mapbox figured out how to easily implement walking and biking directions as opposed to just driving directions.
