My Story: A Forum Discussion App
Mini Challenge 2, Apple Developer Academy @ BINUS
There are 6 of us, a complete stranger who interested in students’ problems. With 1 big idea and much challenges later, we manage to finish it in time.
A few weeks in the Academy, working from home for, don’t know how many days, comes Mini Challenge 2
Team formation
I took the role as a designer for this challenge. Usually there are 5 people in a group but there are some cases, which is not rare, to have more people, in our case is 6 people. There are 3 people who chose code, which turns out that 1 person will be our PM, and the rest of the team chose design role.
First thing first, we created our team agreement. Here we communicate our schedule, when can we be reach and when we were unavailable. We created some commitment regarding our project like how to handle conflict and decision making. We identify our goals early too so we know what we must do.
We also have goals we wanted to achieve. We want the app to function well and bug free. We also want that our app is useful to our target users. Everyone in our team wants to try new things too as some of us never in the design role. We also want to work well as a team.
Research
Creating Effective Learning During The Pandemic
First and foremost, research. We did our research using CBL. We conducted desk research for some time regarding studying and how the pandemic affected it.
We done some desk research. We get some new insights although it is still limited. Later we decided that we need to conduct interview to students. We made a list of how many people can we find to conduct an interview.
We agree that older students are responsible for their own education. Their life and education is not their teachers or lecturers responsibility. They are more mature and can make their own decision. While this is true, it is not the case for younger students. They still need guidance, teachers play a role in their education. We decided to narrow our users to Junior and High School students.
Later, we need to decided what we needed from our users. We make lists of possible triggering questions for our interviewee. Each person handles up to 2 person.
After we finished conducting interview, we decided to focus on Junior High School student as they need more guidance than Senior High School students.
They students get easily distracted, procrastinate, lacking motivation, difficult obtaining learning material and only study just for the sake of completing assignments. Their teachers also did not explain school subject clearly, which is not helping, while repeating the same routine everyday for their students.
Utilizing other media that can boost the level of effectiveness in learning will be very helpful in making the quality of learning itself better.
We managed to complete this long and tiring process with the help of our mentor too, Ka Anis, Mam Zin and Ka Thoya.
Solution Concept
Finally, after a few days of discussion we decided to make an application that function as a discussion forum for students and teachers by providing them platform to post questions while others can answer in a card style view. This will help students to discuss materials with their friends and teacher in an asynchronous way, so they can literally study anywhere and anytime and not just for the sake for completing their given assignments.
An application that function as a discussion forum for students and teachers by providing them platform to post questions while others can answer in a card style view.
Introducing Buddy
Divided into 3 main section using UICollectionView. Thanks to our great PM Lukius, our coder who was able to make this happen, Daniel and Alnodi also our design team who manage to design this app while having no design background at all, Marvin and Duvan.
Trending shows a topic that currently having many replies by users. Terbaru shows latest topic from each school subject. Users can scroll horizontally on this section.
Based on our user testing and feedback, users can use, navigate and complete given tasks with little to no difficulty. They said that it feels familiar so it did not took a long time for them to familiarize.
Blue and orange
We decided to use blue because it is a non-threatening color and bring calms to mind. We were hoping users can calm and relax while they were studying. While we conducting user testing, our users did not have any complain with the color.
Orange looks good with blue, they sit across with each other on the color wheel so we decided to use is as a secondary color (complementary color).
Well there is also white that looks good with anything, so yeah. And we were using grey and light blue as the card background color. Honestly, we were having a hard time deciding this issue but we proceed eventually with the current color as you can see above.
The school subject icon originally did not look like that. Thank to Daniel, who create the icon, although it is not his main duty, our app become more clean and modern.
App Review
When review time comes, we were pretty content because we manage to finish this app. The app itself is functioning pretty well. Our reviewer said that this app has potential to restructure the whole education system if it is used in the right way. We do not know if he’s just being nice or that was his honest feedback, all we know is that his feedback lift our morale, by a lot.
It is nice to be given a feedback that is meaningful and useful. We have not think that far but his words makes sense. If we can utilize this app for every school, just imagine what can be achieve by students and teacher. With the right use of technology, study is no longer a burden, but a blessing.
Lesson learnt
There are some things that can be improve like exploring design as a references for our overall UI and UX. We need a considerable amount of time to decide our layout and other UI element. We also need to be better as a team, maybe learn the best practice for implementing Scrum. We also need to have more courage to ask when we stuck with something.
Also, as a team, we manage to not reverse engineer our solution, so our app is based on real data and users’ problem. We also managed to resolve internal conflicts with no problems as our team have good cooperation and communication. We also finish our project in time and functioning well.
