SpareTime
This project I worked on was from my Professional Practice module in 3rd year of college. The aim of the module was for us students to undertake a project that involves the design and implementation of a software application in a workplace environment. This project was carried out in groups of two, me and my project partner Caolán. This project was managed using the Scrum methodology, therefore our project team was assigned a supervisor who fulfilled the role of scrum master and product owner during this project.
What is SpareTime?
Phase 1
The first phase of the project involved the team researching into applications target market such as creating personas, conducting interviews and questionnaires, creating empathy maps, developing scenarios for our personas, and then developing prototypes to solve the personas interaction in the scenario.
This part of the project was also a continuous assessment for another module I had in Interaction Design. All research, prototypes and evaluations can be found in a Miro board I created where me and my project partner collaborated on.
During this phase of the project, a number of blog posts were submitted by both members of the team. The platform used for these blog posts was Wordpress. The blog posts covered the following topics in more detail: Problem identification, paper prototypes, evaluation, design iteration and reflection. You can view the wordpress site below.
Phase 2
Phase 2 of the project consisted of researching, designing, testing and evaluating the usability and user experience of the SpareTime application. This allowed me to further develop my skills in areas of user research, interaction design and usability testing. Evaluation and feedback are central to the interaction design process. Formative evaluation at different stages of development checked that the product met the users' needs.
This phase of the project can be viewed in our Miro board also which includes, a usability test consent form, a pre-test questionnaire, a post-test questionnaire, an introduction said aloud to the participent before the usability study commenced, a list of test tasks given to the participent during the study, a link to the recorded usability tests, an analysis of the usability tests and finally, wireframes of design changes based off of our analysis.
These two phases were the primary phases involving UX and UI. The team conducted many more phases involving implementation and project management.
The overall result of this project was that me and my project partner, Caolán were able to develop an application for students or anyone who needs to manage their time. The team were successfully able to create a CRUD functionality for events and be able to display those events visually onto a calendar. The status of these events can also be managed as ‘ongoing’ or ‘complete’. A to-do list functionality was implemented successfully where a user can create a list of to-dos for each event and mark them as complete or delete. Based off the team’s user testing results the users have stated that the application was simple and easy-to-use which is what was intended since the beginning of the applications development.
SpareTime Video Demonstration
Finally, below is a demonstration video of our application 'SpareTime'. Myself and my project partner talk through the project in more detail!