What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).
The primary objective for me this week was to conduct research and work on the initial stages of planning our project.
During the front end of the week, I focused on assisting with scheduling and task division, user/market research and developing the physical design and iOS application use case requirements for the proposal presentation. I communicated with my team members to develop a list of tasks and rough scheduling timeline to create a Gantt Chart. I attempted to segment our project as much as possible into smaller, achievable goals.
To accurately understand the design requirements for the outer casing/physical component of our project, I started by surveying the market of existing products. This involved gathering data from e-commerce sites associated with the consumer habits of our proposed market regarding earring size, material, type and backings. Information was compiled into a spreadsheet to enable us to develop realistic design constraints. Additionally, I conducted further research into safety guidelines for skin safe wearable materials, thermal ranges for parts in contact with skin, jewellery weight limits and design factors that can lead to dangerous conditions for consumers (i.e. ear infections, scarring , tearing etc).
I also worked on developing the solutions approach for the iOS application. I looked at several different development avenues, including developing a cross platform application using React, or working with a combination of Apple’s UIKit. Due to our limited time and scope for this project, ultimately SwiftUI was chosen due to its higher compatibility for iOS 16 and better support for user interface development. I also looked into the APIS & libraries we could potentially use to interface with our wearable (CoreBlueTooth & CoreData). After determining an appropriate solutions approach, to gain a. I looked over documentation and tutorials on the apple developer website as well as some existing projects for BLE communication on GitHub.
After the presentation, whilst our group waits for hardware parts I took the opportunity to start planning the user interface for our application. This has involved analysing existing mobile applications for smart home devices and lights, wearables and other bluetooth devices. This enabled me to gain a better understanding of the layouts, user flows and components that will provide an optimal user experience. Additionally I started working on a design system in figma (colour scheme, typography, component design and graphic elements). I also created a preliminary user flow diagram and started working on low fidelity wireframes.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
According to the Gantt chart I am currently on schedule.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
By the end of next week I hope to have all planning for the software completely done and to have possibly started working on some of the front end. I also hope to work with my other group members to have finalised a few options for the physical design of our earring.