Starting the project
During my time at Utah Valley University, also known as "UVU" I learned a lot about being a web designer. Meeting not just great people to be around and to work along side with but to be taught by wonderful professors that guided me through the process and my progress as I became a web designer and developer. The level of the professors where very caring for us as students as long as we communicated things and asked for help and understanding. One Professor, by name of Professor Hatch, became my client, my boss, and my mentor at the same time for this project study. Professor Hatch was great as he explained the problem as to having to create a schedule for the teachers and having to separate everything given to him from the school board and trying to coordinate it with the professors schedules in teaching their assigned classes. He showed us the three to four things he had to bring up on his computer in order to have everything work together about this very complicated process towards what should be a simple schedule. The unfortunate thing about this project and study was that the Professor partnered me up with one other student that came in feeling like he was not going to participate in this project at all.
Knowing the details
We started out learning about Appian which had some issues with the way we wanted to project to become simple and easy to do. Signing papers like a business would in the confidentiality of the project and to record who would be working on it. The professor wanted my group to look into Appian.com to see if it will work for the ideal thing. In doing our research on the Appian platform we found that it was not the greatest in helping us get an excel spreadsheet to work with a calendar aspect. Instead Appian was meant for data and recording data rather than to distribute and sort out the data into both an excel sheet and a calendar. We would need to come up with an algorithm or code that can help separate a CSV file into an excel spread sheet and a calendar all in one place was hard. Appian just could not come up with the right solution for us to use. So the task was to come up with an app that can strive to do both.
These pictures are a rough draft and sketch toward the idea of the app we needed to build.
We had to start out from scratch as we came to know what the professor wanted and detailed it into wireframes as there was much discussion into what was needed and what features we can have or add to the app. The details were specific and not just written down but drawn out so that I could be able to use all my creative design skills to put it into Figma. My chosen partner on the other hand just was not liking the project at all even though his task was to discover all he can and find out how to use appian.com for our project.
Challenges of the project
The time we were given for this project was two full semesters to find a solution that works to help build a customizable calendar with the back up details provided to explain the calendar that is semester based. From start to finish The CSV file provided all the details of the courses by name, course number, teacher assigned, class room number, times held for that class course, and the department it is under. I had to differentiate all of it as I sorted out all the information i needed to collect from the csv file. That way it would not look as long or as complicated as it was in the original file.
My First problem that I encountered in the project was trying to get all the necessary information correct as I was putting together all the details of the project and making sure every part of what my client wanted it to look like was exact and how they envisioned it. Striving to design it all for myself as a designer was a lot of fun even if the details where being very picky about the selected design that I was tasked to create. Through much discussion and taking the time to create everything on Figma I was able to finalize on the wireframes and start working the magic with the surface compositions.
These pictures were part of the finalized surface compositions for the project.
With the Wireframes I followed it up by creating a calendar piece that would look as if it took that information and transform it into a week by week schedule for each class room available. Although the design process to make it look the way the professor wanted it to. I could not help but wonder about the student i was assigned to. Seeing how he did try with Appian but kept running into problems that the Appian program had and then to see him slowly give up was never good.
After the first half of the project was over with all the design work completed. I had to be agile with the project and in dealing with the assigned partner while I kept discussing the problems with the the professor. After seeing that the Appian part of the project failed to give us any hope we had to make a huge pivot and find something else that would help and suit the needs of the professor being our client. This is where we found an online program known as Airtable.com.
The website of airtable.com gave us a closer solution to solve the problem but the student that I was assigned to became more of the problem in choosing to sit back and make me do all the work. So I took the time to do all the research on how Airtable works and how to add in all the necessary information that we needed it to narrow down and put the proper data into two different areas. I was able to create and narrowed down the excel sheet part on air table with the tabs it provided from the uploaded CSV file. I was also able to set up and had found a way to make a calendar schedule based off of the info from the csv file. However That part came with some difficulty.
The only problem I truly had encountered was how to connect the two and sink them both if there where necessary changes that needed to be made. Perhaps it needed some coding work that could help solve the problem with some kind of coded algorithm. But seeing how my assigned partner felt like it was going to be an "all to do nothing class" for him made me upset. It was simply not fair on my end of having to do the entire project for myself in finding a solution that could have been solved faster and better with two or three people. It did not help that the professor chose not to help in that situation at all. Feeling like it was all a dead end, I did my best to see how things can work even if my partner kept up the whole saying of how this project was a failure from the start and simply gave up in doing the rest or to be of little to no help.
After all the encouraging that I tried to do and getting to know this partner, he was more enthusiastic it talking about other things and showing off his other projects and was more than happy to be a distraction. The only thing I could do was to talk with the professor about everything that was going on and ask for advice and suggestions on how to handle my team member and the project. Until we gave our presentation at the end of the semester with all our studies and showing off the progress of the work I did for both of us. During the presentation It was disappointing to hear him talk as though everything he thought that could go wrong did go wrong and wasted a lot of our time to try and find the right platform online to work with for the project. In some truth of this it did prevent us from going further with the project at hand. I felt like The way he helped in our presentation told everyone else we presented our project to was as if we did nothing and that there was no good solution or a recommended back up option for the project to be fully completed over the time frame we were given. It was such a put down on both of us as I was left to answer as many questions the rest of the groups and other professors we presented our finalized project to. and how he did not help to find a better recommended solution for the project.
What I have learned
Sadly, I had a hard time pushing through to see how i can get every thing together and to see how i can personally succeed my way through with a positive outlook. Even though I am happy to have done my part successfully in getting all the design work done. The last problem I had was to spend sometime to get to know what Airtable is all about and how to use it as I was getting all the data and things together. Even though it all did not turn out exactly like my prototype I worked so hard on. sometimes in dealing with difficult people. talking it through with your boss can only go so far until a correction has taken place so that the work on a project or site can continue. being agile and adaptable in solving problems can be mentally challenging and a struggle when you do not know how to work with everything. As well as being worried that not everything will be able to work together as you thought it would.
When others in a group setting are struggling It is best to know the why to the problem at hand to help each other out. To be able to focus on the task from start to finish. other times it is just best to take the project and do the best you can with it before you pass it on to someone else that knows best on how to fix the problems and finish it from there. Even if most of the work if not all of it was completed. it is also helpful to have someone there to test out the project and also to double check the work.
The outcome of the project.
The best part of doing this project was to go through all the steps that I have learned and making sure I was methodical and thorough with it all. With the ideal sketches, I was able to come up with a site map, proto-personas, empathy and journey maps, wireframes, wired prototypes, surface compositions, and finalized prototypes. In the final scope I was able to prove that my prototype worked with all its components, and connected animations. Being able to gain the impressive wow factor, I documented the rest of what we needed in order to show case the rest of the project as far as my assigned partner and I could go with the amount of time that we had.
Optimistically I put all the pieces together and did a fantastic job in the presentation part of the project. I felt that we were absolutely on to something with the professor guiding us through each step of the process and trying to see the best solution to the project. I showed how Airtable.com can be a good solution that can help benefit to what we can do with the CSV file and how it can break things down into and easier readable excel spread sheet and to also make a great calendar schedule. The problem we were not able to solve was how to combine them both and to be able to make the two connect with and sync with data between the two. This part of the project was much harder to figure out especially when changes were needed to be made to the file.
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