What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?
This week I worked on completing the bulk of the preparation, research and planning required for the iOS app and UI. My goal was not only to provide a sufficient amount of documentation for the design presentation, but to also create a through set of clear and specific guidelines to optimise collaboration efficiency during app development.
Task 1 – Finalising the UI Design System
After conducting research on existing mobile interfaces and accessibility guidelines I finalised the team’s colour palette and typography choices. I then created a collaborative document for our team’s UI development on Figma and inputted the design system as a set of local styles.
Task 2 – Low Fidelity Wireframing
I then worked on drafting guidelines for all the potential screens, views and modals that would be required for our application. This involved determining all the components and widgets that the user would require to navigate our application. Additionally, I used guidelines from Apple’s developer documentation to determine the minimum size, padding, margin etc. constraints required for all components (i.e. sliders, buttons, cards) to be user-friendly.
As these wireframes are low fidelity and our first draft for the application, they only contain exact specifications for component/view size and layout (currently in “px” units and designed for iPhone 14, but will be implemented as a responsive design). We are planning to finalise the colour scheme and render components early next week.
Task 3 – Finalising Userflow
Utilising feedback from the proposal presentation, I updated our initial to increase the salience/readability of our MVP goals. I also added the LF wireframes to the flow chart to provide an extensive overview of user actions. Labels and icons specifying user gestures such as “touch” and “vertical swipe” were integrated to demonstrate the user actions required to traverse different views.
Task 4 – iOS Research
To prepare for app development, I started taking notes on the documentation on the apple developer website. Specifically, I looked at the specific classes available for different UI Views and started mapping these back to the components specified in the wireframes. Additionally, I looked into recommended architectures for iOS design and discovered that Apple’s developer tools primarily support using an MVVM (model, view, view-model) architecture, as opposed to the MVC architecture we had initially planned on using.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
I am slightly behind at this point in time as I had planned on having the UML diagram completed by today. As swift seems to require an MVVM architecture, I have had to spend some time doing additional research to ensure I can accurately draft plans for our proposed models and views. As these plans are required for the design presentation, I will have to put in additional time to finish before the slides are due.
I was also hoping to have drafted some plans for the physical design, however I had to de-prioritise this task due to commitments outside of the class.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Next Week, I plan to finalise the colour scheme and UI design with my teammates and start working on the front-end development of the application in swiftui.
Please list the particular ECE courses (if any) that covered the engineering science and mathematics principles your team used to develop your design ? If there are no courses please tells us how you learned those principles over the last week ?
As I have worked mostly on the software development part of our project, I have found 17-437 (Web Application Development) to provide the most relevant information. However, whilst this gave me a good understanding of basic design principles and application development, I have some gaps in my knowledge in regards to app design. I have some experience from internships with Android development, but I have had to do additional research to learn iOS development. This has mostly involved looking at documentation on the apple developer site, watching tutorials on youtube and looking at existing projects on gitHub.
On the broader spectrum of our project, I believe knowledge from 18-349 (Embedded Systems), 18-220 (Analog Circuit Design) and 18-213 (Computer Systems) will be beneficial.