Final Reflection!!!

Final Reflection!!!

I really enjoyed working with the team of Homestigation and it was fun experience doing this course. I am very much pleased with the final outcome from all three stages of the project and the process. And at every step of my journey I learned a lot and mastered new techniques and also learned team work. I also learned how to manage a project and I think this course is   structured in such a way that it helps you learn it effectively. All the deliverables of the course are aligned with each other and if you keep up with the deadlines than it becomes a whole lot easy.

Link to our application: deco1800-43.uqcloud.net

Link to my portfolio: http://folio.uqcloud.net/s4007532/

Entry : 2/10/14

The Trade Show:

It was a busy day but a very fun day. I was very busy with the logistics and running the show. It was fun working with the team of Homestigation.

Here are some memorable pictures.

The Trade Show work in progress... :

After the designing of poster, brochure and instructions display banner was complete I ordered these items to be developed and on the day of the presentation I organized a self-pick up of these items. I also wanted to have a nice white background for the tradeshow so I organized a stand for the stage, curtains and table covers. And I also took care of all logistics of these items. I used the best decoration with professional style of presentation to showcase our project. I also made power point presentation for the sales pitch, in short, I took care of all the little details even what to wear and what not to wear. 

Currently, I am working on the pitch and  power point presentation. It will be presented in our Trade Show on the plasma TV (if available).

Entry : 28/10/14

Getting ready for the trade show:

The other thing I was doing on the side was to create ideas and themes for our trade show. I called the meeting to discuss the design of the trade show but no one wanted to meet because two members were busy with their assignment. So I finalized one design myself and asked Khalafan to help me make product brochure, poster and instructions banner.

Here are some pictures:

Final Trade Show Poster

Final Trade Show Poster

We also designed a poster for the background, here is a screen shot from Khalfan's computer.

Reflective Journal Entry, 25/10/2014

Reflective Journal Entry, 25/10/2014

In the contact session we had to present our digital prototype and do user testing. We had almost all the major functions of the website up and running.

For the digital prototype I have developed a simple user interface for the PHP database as well. It is a simple php page that gives latitude and longitude information of the suburb and can be used to plot the different markers and can be used in processing the hot spots in the Homestigation website.

Here is the php code:

This is the screen shot of the page.

Entry: 14/10/14

In response to user feedback:

We met today with our group and discussed how to apply changes in response to user feedback from last week’s presentation and  how our final website should look like. We had to consider both interface and functionality of the website. Khalfan drew new wire frame because he was doing most of the HMTL, CSS and JavaScript. We all agreed on the wireframe

Pictures are below:

Entry: 11/10/14

 

Back to our inspiration site:

After the feedback we received from the digital prototype done in the past contact class, we have decided to change the hotspots into maps/heat maps. As users who tested our web app. preferred the maps instead of the hotspots.

So I went back to our inspiration site and changed the design. One other problem with the hotspots was that we didn't have an accurate address to drop the marker on hotspots. We can only drop markers according to suburb lat. and long., but if the suburb has more than one result then all markers will be dropped on the same spot

Entry: 11/10/14

Digital prototyping:

In this week’s contact session we had to present our digital prototype and do user testing or our website. We had almost all the major functions of the website up and running.

I have developed a simple user interface for the PHP database as well. It is a simple php page that gives latitude and longitude information of the suburb and can be used to plot the different markers and can be used in processing the hot spots in the Homestigation website.

We will ask the user if he want to see the hotspots (markers on the maps) or prefer maps (heat maps).

User Feedback:

Most of the users choose heat maps since it is more presentable and shows which suburb of Brisbane the user selected using colours.

Also I've also experienced that some users did not notice the suburb selection box and the search bar inside the select box, since the colours were too light. We had to fix it and change the colours, as I also changed the height of the select box as shown below:

We received some useful feedback from the lecturer and tutors that will help improve the functionality of the application. One feedbacks was to move the search box to a different place, so it it obvious for users.

Entry: 5/10/14

Work in progress and progress report :

Last week I was very busy with presentation  and progress because report was due last week.  This is why I am posting this a bit late (sorry). 

I was  allocated this work of doing both i.e. Presentation & Report.

I was made in-charge of all the reports and other documentation related work. It was tedious task but I did all that in time. 

Here are some screenshots of the web application in-progress:

Here are some parts of our project progress report:

Entry: 27/9/14

Presentation:

During the contact session this week, we had presentation week. In the contact session we had to present our work-in-progress to the class for 5 minutes. We needed to show that three core  functionality of the website, but we still did not call trove API (connected trove with the application).

For this I have developed a simple user interface for the PHP database. It is a simple php page that gives latitude and longitude information of the suburb and can be used to plot the deferent markers and can be used in processing the hot spots in the Homestigation website. This was the third core function of our website and I allocated myself this work because I enjoy doing this.

We will ask the user if he want to see the hotspots (markers on the maps) or prefer maps (heat maps).

Screen shot of the simple php interface:

I also had to make the power point presentation and pitch. I made all that and sent the pitch to all group members so that we are on the same page. 

This was to showcase that all the three core functions of the website are working and I was also in-charge of taking notes of the user feedback.

Here is a screen shot of the presentation slides.

Entry: 20/9/14

In Response To User Feedback:

We went back to drawing table and redrew a new wireframe and tied up those lose ends and changed  our website accordingly.

On the other side I was working on PHP to create and populate an online database for all the suburbs around Brisbane. In the workshop session I worked on in and finally got it up and running.

Screen shoot of phpMyAdmin Database:

Week 7 Entry: 13/9/14

Paper Prototype:

In human–computer interaction, paper prototyping is a widely used method in the user-centered design process, a process that helps developers to create software that meets the user's expectations and needs—in this case, especially for designing and testing user interfaces. It is throwaway prototyping and involves creating rough, even hand-sketched, drawings of an interface to use as prototypes, or models, of a design. While paper prototyping seems simple, this method of usability testing can provide a great deal of useful feedback which will result in the design of better products.

                                                                  (wikipedia)

This week in the contact we had to present a prototype so I called the meeting to figure out an effect way of building a paper prototype that can be used by the users to perform a series of tasks.

It was a bit of challenge at first because we had to make the prototype in a way that user can interact with it without any instructions as if they are there alone with the website and performing the task. Their feedback was very important as it was the very reason we had to build the prototype.

But after a few brainstorming sessions we had a rough idea what we wanted and we allocated subtasks to each member to perform. And we made the prototype.

Next day During the testing session we split our team in two groups for the first round where Kenny and Kartik went to test other team prototypes, while Khalfan and myself stayed in the group with our prototype to take their feed back. Then we swapped groups for the second round. 

Images of the paper prototype:

1. Shows the hotspots of the bushfire incidents happend in 1950.

2. User clicked on one of the hotspots a box will pop-up showing some text and a picture

3. This page shows the articles of the droughts incidents happened in 1950. As the user scrolled down the page, more articles will be shown, if applicable

USER FEEDBACK:

In terms of feedback, the most useful feedback was as following:

·                     Size of Hotspots should signifies something.

·                     A new tab to view the complete article.

·                     Auto-correct if searched for an invalid location.

·                     Allow multi-selection of different types of natural disasters.

The less useful feedback was as following:

·                     Increase the year range from 10 years to 20 years.

·                     Show hovering functionality when in hotspots.

·                     A new tab that will take users to trove.

Introduction

The Scope

Few years ago Queensland was hit by a series of severe nature disasters including drought, bush fire, floods and typhoons- affecting thousands of people. Causing towns and cities, destroyed properties and affecting many lives. At least 70 towns and over 200,000 people were affected and estimated damage of 2.40 billion dollars (Wikipedia 2014). Those incidents in past brought in about a lot of changes and also provided basis to our idea of developing Homestigation. Homestigation is an interactive website that is an essential tool in finding a good property investment that is secure and natural calamity safe. So, the main concept behind our idea is to provide people with a service that can be used to check whether a place is naturally safe and secure with the help of the data that we will provide on the website that can be analysed for the same purpose. Our website will consists of relevant and dynamically clustered data representing it in the form of graphs, maps and hotspots about natural disasters that have occurred in the past. The main interface of the website displays three tabs that are maps, graphs and hot spots. Each of these tabs will display data on natural disasters like floods, cyclones, droughts, bushfire for suburbs in Queensland. The map will display the suburbs of Queensland in different colours depending upon the magnitude of the disasters that has hit the specific area, while the hotspot pin points the different specific disasters, and the graph gives the details of the calamity in the form processed data.

Inspiration & Research

Homestigation is website that is made for users to investigate if a particular home is safe by using information on Trove. Information from Trove would consist of murders, crimes and occurrence of natural disasters around the area. We wanted to target the crimes and murder of a particular area as well however we’ve decided to “discard” it to target only the specific area of natural disasters in Queensland as the scope was too big. Plans on bringing back the removed concepts will be looked into implementing after the website’s initial implementations.

We wanted to target a smaller scope than the whole of Australia and chose Queensland, having that said Queensland had a long history of natural disasters. Due to the conditions in Queensland, it is prone to a variety of natural disasters, such as, cyclones, floods, and drought and bush fire. (Australia Government, 2014)

The main inspiration behind Homestigation is a crime tool issues by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research which showed the crime rates of each suburbs in New South Wales as a colour coded map. The crime tool allowed users to select various types of offences as well as showing users the data of different time frames. The users can choose to also receive the data as a table or a graph.

Similar to the New South Wales Crime tool, inspiration was also drawn from another crime mapping tool by The Omega Group for the United States region. We wanted to take upon a similar concept to theirs where their crime mapping had the ability to click and show more as to what happened in the area. (Crime Mapping 2014) We also took some inspiration from Alan Travis’ Map of Crime data in Britain (The Guardian, 2010)

The Design Concept

Purpose

Homestigation is a website that features data such as information, stats, graphs, pictures on natural calamities that have occurred in the past in suburbs of Queensland. This information will be portrait to the users in the form of maps, graphs and hotspots in an interactive way that it can be further used to analyse threats that can occur in the future based on what has already happened in the past. This website can be used by target users to analyse the safety of suburbs based on natural disasters in the past in Queensland for a better future.

Audience

Through Homestigation we want to provide a useful service that people can use for beneficial purposes. The main targeted audience for this website would be people who want to buy homes in new localities, people renting houses and the owners who are interested in knowing about their locality. Other potential users of Homestigation are; investors, property brokers and insurance risk assessment companies that would like analyse specific areas that have faced natural calamities in the past or are prone to them in future.

Interactivity

Figure 1: Homestigation Homepage

Figure 2: Maps Tab

Figure 3: Graphs tab with Charts selected

The mock up in figure 1 shows the Homestigation homepage. This page displays the main map of Queensland along with hotspots pinpointing the areas that were affected with some kind of natural disasters in the past. Then the there are some options on the left that you can use to specifically search for natural calamities like floods, droughts, cyclones etc. On the top as you can see there are different tabs that can be used to explore some other features such as maps and graphs displaying information and stats of the natural calamity happened. The Figure 2 displays the maps that can be accessed using the tab present on the top. This feature displays the Queensland map along with information such as what area was affected by a certain calamity and to what extent. Figure 3 displays the graphs and gives our user important stats about natural calamities that occurred.

Utilization of Trove Data

We plan on using Trove data by using its API to gather data from their articles database, searching for particular key words that will bring out data on natural disasters in Queensland. With that than the data will be used to plot the points of natural disasters on the map as well as populate the graphs and table of their occurrence.

Poster

Figure 4: Homestigation Poster

The Poster is created with Wix HTML Editor. (Wix, 2014)

Reference

Bureau of Crime Statistic and Research. 2013. NSW crime tool. [ONLINE] Available at:http://crimetool.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/bocsar/. [Accessed 19 August 14].

Anon. 2014. Queensland Floods. [ONLINE] Available at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%9311_Queensland_floods. [Accessed 22 August 14].

Kathryn Wells. 2014. Natural disasters in Australia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/natural-disasters. [Accessed 25 August 14].

The Omega Group. 2014. Crime Mapping. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.crimemapping.com/default.aspx. [Accessed 25 August 14].

Alan Travis. 2010. What has happened to crime?. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.theguardian.com/uk/datablog/2010/apr/26/factfile-uk-crime-statistics#. [Accessed 25 August 14].

Wix. 2014. Wix. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wix.com/. [Accessed 25 August 14].

Week 6 Entry: 6/9/14

In this week’s contact session we were told to figure out the core functionalities of our website and start working on it. So our team had a brainstorming session to critically analyse our task and subdivide that task into more simple subtasks. Our finding were as follows:

Three Core functions of our websites:

1.       Making an API request to trove and getting the relevant data and cleansing that data.

2.       Making another API request to get the geo-coding data from the Google map and getting latitude and longitude information in order to plot the hotspot on the map.

3.       Making of the actual user interface using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Week 5 entry :-

Poster for our Design Idea

Week 4 Contact hours Activity 

Six Thinking Hats: A Tool to Strengthen Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Creativity Skills

Source : http://www.debonoforschools.com/asp/six_hats.asp