To kick off our prototyping process, we began with storyboarding. We decided to storyboard the different experiences we wanted our users to have since there were so many different directions that we could take the project. Through this we learned that the core functionality we wanted to support was:
users being able to record and replay audio journal entries
user’s audio should be analyzed for sentiment and
the user should be able to receive recommendations/reminders about how they felt a while ago
After we had finished storyboarding, we decided to create a prototype on Figma. We decided to use Figma for the task because it would allow us to create very detailed designs that would permit the group members working on the android app to get started with the implementation. Also, the Figma prototype would allow us to see what colors, fonts, and information architecture we should have in the app. Then, we used Figma to also evaluate our mockup using their prototyping functionality that mimics how the design would run a real phone.
Users typically liked the overall setup of the design. We decided to change a few things and proceeded to implement the design into the android app
We had some difficulties at this stage. Because of the current situation, we ended up being left without the teammate who had lots of experience designing so we ended up taking longer than expected to create the designs. Also, we could not get a sense of how to design/or implement any of the extra features we were hoping to get done, so we ended up deciding to focus on only the core functionality
We ended up building an Android application that had the core functionality we described earlier. We were not able to implement the extra features we had outlined in our project proposal, due to time constraints and their complexity being greater than what we had imagined.
We had a good number of challenges when implementing the application. The learning curve for the IBM Watson API’s that handled the tone analysis was steep. This was mainly due to documentation consisting of examples that used older Android API versions which had methods that are now deprecated. Also, the examples were in Java, and we only knew Kotlin. While Kotlin can be written in a Java-like manner, not everything translates directly.