Author: madelind

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.

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.