This is the last week of this project! With our final prototype and our evaluations done, all there is left to do is complete our final presentation, report, website, and video, and to turn the project in.

Goals​

• Create the final project presentation
• Create a demo video for the presentation
• Present the project
• Compile the final project report
• Create the final project video
• Update and finalize the final project website
• Turn the assignment in

Tasks​

Ella​

• Create a demo video
• Present the intro/demo parts of the final presentation
• Write up the back-end details for the final report
• Create the final project video

Kayla​

• Present the user requirements gathering part of the final presentation
• Write up the front-end details for the final report

Miranda​

• Work with Sarah on creating the final presentation
• Present the use cases and low-fidelity prototype parts of the final presentation
• Compile the introduction and low-fidelity prototype sections of the final report
• Put all required information on the project website

Sarah​

• Create the final presentation
• Present the evaluation section of the final presentation
• Write up the evaluation section of the final report

Challenges​

• None!

Reflection​

We wrapped the project up quite nicely and are done! Thank you for reading about our journey. This was a very exciting and fun project to work on and build, and I am proud of all the work that we’ve put into this.

The final prototype is almost done, and we have just slightly over a week until our final presentation. We set out to test all our functionality and to add a few last finishing touches, and then to deploy and evaluate the final prototype.

Goals​

• Test and troubleshoot functionality on mobile and wide-screen devices
• Add automatic image filtering
• Add user notifications
• Localize all strings to all four languages
• Deploy the final prototype
• Begin conducting evaluations of our prototype

Tasks​

Ella​

• Test all functionality and report issues
• Add automatic image filtering
• Translate strings into Russian
• Deploy the website with Sarah
• Test functionality on deployed version
• Evaluate Russian users

Kayla​

• Test all functionality and report issues
• Add user notifications
• Fix CRON jobs being lost when server restarts
• Test functionality on deployed version

Miranda​

• Test all functionality and report issues
• Translate strings into Spanish
• Test functionality on deployed version
• Evaluate Spanish users
• Begin compiling information for project website

Sarah​

• Test all functionality and report issues
• Finalize evaluation plan and surveys
• Translate strings into Chinese
• Deploy the website with Ella
• Test functionality of deployed version
• Evaluate Chinese and English users

Challenges​

• There were the regular issues with deployment and making sure everything was still working, but we were able to resolve them in the course of our initial deployment session.
• Everything else went smoothly.

Reflection​

This was a very productive week! We have our final prototype and most of our evaluations completed and are ready to put together the final presentation, report, video and website.

With the due date of the project and our presentation coming up in just a couple weeks, we wanted to get as much of the technical development of our final prototype done by the end of this week as possible in order to have time to translate everything we needed to translate, deploy the application, run evaluations, and make our presentation next week. Due to team member schedules and wanting the codebase to be consistent and smoothly interconnected, we decided to have Kayla and Ella take on most of the remaining development responsibilities in exchange for Sarah and Miranda taking a lead on the evaluation and presentation aspects of the project in the coming weeks.

Goals

• Implement random daily prompt assignments
• Implement user messaging
• Implement unmatching and reporting
• Come up with an evaluation plan
• Gather everything that will need to be localized in JSON files / spreadsheets

Tasks

Ella​

• Create the socket.io endpoints for loading in conversation and match data, getting user data, sending a new message, and blocking/reporting a match
• Set up prompts to update every 24 hours after a conversation is first created
• Complete the individual evaluation plan assignment
• Add prompt ideas to the prompts spreadsheet

Kayla​

• Finish the front-end pages for conversations, user profiles, and picture selection/taking/drawing
• Integrate the back-end API and endpoints into the front-end client Complete the individual evaluation plan assignment

Miranda​

• Complete the individual evaluation plan assignment
• After group evaluation plan is determined, work with Sarah to create a detailed procedure outline and necessary pre/post surveys
• Add prompt ideas to the prompts spreadsheet

Sarah​

• Complete the individual plan assignment
• After group evaluation plan is determined, work with Miranda to create a detailed procedure outline and necessary pre/post surveys
• Add prompt ideas to the prompts spreadsheet
• Double check the list of front-end strings to be localized

Challenges

• Besides lots of troubleshooting and debugging, everything went pretty smoothly.
• Programming actual functionality made us realize that some changes should be made to our database schema, but all were easy to implement.
• Ella unfortunately was busier than anticipated with other classes and onboarding documents for her new job but Kayla really stepped up and drove the development of the prototype further, jumping in on some of the back-end tasks as well.

Reflection

While a few layout and technical issues remain and there is additional functionality we’d like to add if we have time (such as email notifications), the vast majority of our final prototype is now functional! We will use the first few days of next week to iron out those last technical difficulties while also getting translations and our evaluation plan ready to go and should still be on schedule.

Since we fell somewhat behind last week, we wanted to regroup and catch up to where we wanted to be by the start of the week. Then, since we anticipated our team members having more time this week, we wanted to focus on implementing what we foresaw to be the hardest technical aspects of the project - real time server/client communication and the penpal matching system. We also planned to have an extra meeting to work on the project in the same space for three hours to make sure the front-end and back-end development was on the same page.

Goals

• Configure user creating and authentication on the back-end
• Decide on framework for real-time communication between client and server
• Implement match requests and matching algorithm
• Experiment with the color-scheme, making the design look less like U of R colors

Tasks

Ella​

• Create user authentication functions and endpoints on the server with JWT
• Discuss real-time server communication with the rest of team
• Start implementing real-time endpoints for user matching

Kayla​

• Discuss real-time server communication with the rest of team
• Create the requests/conversations page

Miranda​

• Discuss real-time server communication with the rest of team
• Assist Kayla and Sarah on front-end

Sarah​

• Discuss real-time server communication with the rest of team
• Start collecting strings from the front-end for localization

Challenges

• While setting up websockets and getting real time communication functioning between the server and the client took a lot of time and troubleshooting, having scheduled time to all work on it together in the same place helped us sort it out
• Everything else went pretty smoothly

Reflection

We were able to make a lot of progress this week and catch up more or less to where we wanted to be at this point. Having almost fully tackled the match requests system got an important technical hurdle and milestone out of the way.