When designing an app, what is the balance between including more functionality and making it seem useful versus keeping the app clean, simple, and comfortable to use?
This week, I completed about 50 minutes of the course. Keep in mind, the actual time I spent on this is significantly longer than just 50 minutes. I stopped because the example app from the course stopped working for me. I could not figure out what I did wrong, if I did anything wrong. However, I think I have gained enough knowledge to build just the UI for the app.
iOS build running on an iPhone X emulator
Android build running on my actual phone
This week, I used my new understanding of Ionic to build the UI for my app. There is no functionality so far, and it is likely it will stay that way.
For the first part of this week, I continued the LinkedIn course. It was very difficult to make good progress, because every few minutes I would have to pause the video to make adjustments to the test app. It is very time consuming to go through the lessons, and 1 hour of work does not equate to 1 hour of progress on the videos.
50 minutes into the course, I ran into a serious problem. Before, I only encountered a few missing images here and font differences there, but in this case, the app was not functioning properly at all.
At this point, I think I will change my final product plan. Instead of building a complete app, I will create just the UI (User Interface) of it, and create a mockup to explain what the functionality of the app would be if I were to completely finish it. I think that given the rate of progress that I am making, and the limited time I have left, this is a better plan. My final product will be the app, without functionality, and a mockup plan that shows what each component of my app would do if I finished. This gives me a lot more flexibility with what I can imagine for my final product, because I do not have to worry if I will be able to actually create such functionality.
So this week, I created my mockup app. I finished the first tab of the app. Above, in the Product Goal, you can see that I have added a total time driven counter, along with a breakdown of how many day and night hours have been logged. Below that is a the actual log that shows the minutes recorded, the day and time of the log, and the type of driving (day or night)
Based on the very good progress I made this week, I believe I will be able to comfortably finish the mockup app in time. I feel comfortable with what I need to do now, based on the knowledge I gained from the LinkedIn Course and my prior experience with HTML.
Fig 1. How the practice app looks like.
Fig 3. What the app should have done when I pressed on a card.
Fig 2. How my version looks like. It is more less identical, and up to this point it functioned exactly like how the one in the video did.
Fig 4. What actually happened when I finally opened a card. I couldn't even open it properly; I had to press the first card, and then press the second, and then press the first again to get it to open.
By the next checkpoint, I will have the "Drive" tab finished. Currently I plan to have buttons to start a drive, and then possibly another card that shows hours driven.
At this point I am changing direction and using Ionic Documentation to learn about specific components of my app that I plan to use, rather than the LinkedIn Course.
I am in the create stage, I am now building the actual product. I am also partially in the improve stage, figuring out what I need to change to stay on track, and changing my plan to adjust for that.