#TRIDENT

Project Proposal

Introduction:

Project AIM is an application that helps small businesses to spread the word around the community on their day-to-day offer, events and etc. The problem we aim to address with this application is more towards local businesses such local market, cafes and etc, where they sells fresh products in a daily basis and would like to sell them away at a cheaper price by the end of the day.

This application would help these business owners to put out a notification in the suburb letting people know that they are clearing their certain product at a very low cost before closing and people in that area would get a notification to alert them that their local business owners are clearing some stocks making people in the suburbs aware of these small discounts which could save them a whole lot of money in the future.

Concept:

The idea behind Project Aim is to provide a platform for smaller, local business to advertise their business to the community more effectively. They are able to advertise their product more effectively by giving incentives for the users in the local area to come and buy their stock (for example limited time discounts e.g. come to X business in the next 20 minutes to receive 10% off Y stock). It also makes advertising more effective for these smaller businesses as they do not need to spend nearly as much on advertising on other platforms.

The audience for our application is essentially the general public a local community and the small businesses within that community. It aims to appeal to this audience as an alternative to existing social media websites that focuses more on their surrounding community and benefits both the businesses and the customers by providing them with incentives to use the application (discounts for customer, advertising for business) rather than merely having a Facebook page that exists more as a communication platform between the user and business, or an advertisement in a newspaper/magazine, which may not be as common of a platform used by younger generations. It also benefits users over using internet media by being far more direct in its advertising; a regular social media user may never even see an advertisement or page for a specific business if it is not directly related to their online portrayed interests.

Team:

The team is called ‘Trident’ and consists of four individuals:

• Tengku Abu Bakar - Information Technology
• Dineshkran Rajasingam - Information Technology
• Sebastian Feagan - Software Engineering
• Abdul Rahman Al Mahruqi - Multimedia Design

Roles and responsibility:

• Tengku Abu Bakar - Team Leader and Programmer . Managing the project. Organizing meetings and delegating task to each member. Setting target for each weak to ensure that every week team has something to achieve and each member are contributing to the target of the week. Handles the front end part of the project.
• Dineshkran Rajasingam - Programmer. Ensuring everything is right and everything is on schedule. Creating the content for the stand-up meeting and the final product.
• Sebastian Feagan - Programmer. Ensuring that the team agrees on a single decision. Handles the back end part of the project and the final product.
• Abdul Rahman Al Mahruqi - Designer. Ensuring that every possibilities and flaw has been taken into consideration. Handles the designing part of the project.

Team Commitments:

For the team benefits, we as individuals endeavour to:

• Do our best under the shared understanding of each other’s outside commitments.
• Assess each other’s work equally and fairly.
• Dedicate enough time and effort to finish the tasks satisfactorily.
• Committed to the team until the project is finished.
• Show positive attitude in the team while doing work

Methods for Quality Control:

• Be committed to the meeting schedule, spend the effort to be punctual.
• Create an log or meeting minutes for each meeting that happened.
• Be active and share any ideas/opinions with the group.

Communication Between Members As a team member, we will:

• Communicate with each other regularly outside of daily/weekly meetings to avoid any misunderstandings.
• Use facebook as a primary tool of communication.
• Use email or short message as an alternate method of communication.
• Tried to respond to the team as soon as possible, no longer within 24 hours.

Conflict Resolution: The team will attempt to resolve issues as soon as it arise to avoid issues with the progress on the project and the relationship between team members. The team leader will attempt to solve problems by identifying the issues that need to be addressed. If the problem isn’t resolved, the team will discuss the issue with the teaching staff to find different solutions to end the conflict. Peer assessment will be considered if the majority of the team can’t decide on a solution with the teaching staff.

Communication: The team has agreed to meet three times a week which will be held every Monday from 10am to 12pm in lecture, Thursday from 1pm to 3pm outside of class and Friday from 2pm to 3:50pm during workshop to discuss about the various assessment and task which would be accomplished every week. The main form of communication the team has chosen is facebook, the reason being it provides the flexibility of uploading any form of media and document, and it arrange every post in an orderly timeline. Finally is frequently used by the every member in team Trident which leads to better awareness of updates made by the team.. On facebook, a group has been created to keep each team members updated on the due dates and status of their work. The files would be stored and shared on google drive and github for simultaneous work and files will use the same naming conventions as the assessment for easier understanding.

Team members are expected to check their messages daily, only requiring a response only if it concerns them. If members do not respond within 24 hours, additional forms of communication will be utilised to avoid miscommunication or misunderstanding. If a member remains unresponsive and uncooperative for more than three days after additional actions have been undertaken to reach them, a tutor will be notified to assist in resolving the issue.

Plan: The team developed a road map with the main objectives to be completed before the due dates supplied with the criteria sheet throughout the whole semester.

Week 8: Research and team planning

The team will research the concepts based on the concept to discover new methods to distinguish the application from other social applications. We performed early research to find if AIM will be interesting to users by finding what other products offer, such as Facebook, and how the application will introduce new features to the user. The research changed some parts of the concept from user submitted based news app to an application that provides users with updates and exclusive discounts from businesses in the local area.

A team plan will be implemented according to the specialty of each team member and the roles and responsibilities will be distributed depending on the abilities of the team members. In week 9, the team will implement an interface and some aspects of the back end to test if both users and business owners can use the application as intended and prepare the project for further implementation in the upcoming weeks.

Week 10: User Testing & Evaluation

During user testing and evaluation we would be providing our product which was build in week 9 for users to test. During the testing phase we would be providing users with some scenarios in which they would use the application and we would also be testing the interface face of the application. When testing the interface an observing evaluation would use to identify the difficulty faced by the user. After the testing, each users would have to provide the team with feedback which help improve the user experience.

Week 12: Quick fix based on user testing and evaluation

The team will further develop and flesh out AlM according to user feedback and implement new features suggested by users if it fits the goals of the app and if it possible to complete it within the due date. We will run another testing session after further development on the application to discover if there is any aspects on the app we could improve or if they're any lingering issues left at that point. Finally, the group will use group feedback to further improve the app for the final deliverable.

Tags: Social and Mobile:

1. CSCW
2. Interaction
3. Notification
4. Awareness
5. Synchronisation

Journalism and News:

1. Citizen
2. Communication

Team Progress Report Week 1:

• There is no workshop.

Week 2:

• Individually produce a single slide that explains a challenge that we would like to address during this course this semester.
• The challenge may be a news dilemma or the application of social or mobile technologies to the news domain.

Week 3:

• Finalize project idea and upload it on Blackboard and upload another copy on Slack in the #ideas channel.

Week 4:

• Critique other students project idea and choose one project idea to work on through till the end of semester.
• Form a group of 4 people with different skills.(mixed of both programmers and designers)
• Create a Github account for the team.

Week 5:

• Start writing up the Project Proposal.
• Brainstorming on project idea and how the team plans to move forward with the idea through the semester.

Week 6:

• Presented our project idea to the whole class as an oral pitch.
• Receive feedbacks on our project idea.
• Give critiques to other groups based on their project idea.
• Did research on how our mobile app can be done differently compared to other existing app.

Week 7:

• Brainstorming session to find out the various functionality features that would be beneficial to our application.
• Came up with two functionality features:
• Augmented Reality
• Push notification

Week 8:

• First team stand up meeting.
• Presented our research to the tutor came out with conclusion that we would be incorporating augmented reality and push notification into our application.
• Get Augmented Reality concept done.

Week 9:

• Figure out the type of interaction method we would are using.
• Personas reason being we are able to come out with various scenarios in which people would actually use our application this would help us to come out with various features that would benefits the purpose of the application.
• The team decided to come up with three different personas. The reason is because we have to two different type of audience. (supplier and customer).
• The second method we would use will be user testing during the test we would would like to see if the users are able to understand the application and if the application very user friendly and we would provide various features the to the user to see which is most suitable by them.
• Photos will be taken during this testing session to show tutors for evidence.

Week 10:

• Second team stand up meeting.
• Personas complete
• Get Augmented Reality fully functioning and get Push Notification concept done.

Week 11:

• Get both functionality to work.
• We will perform user testing session.
• Have a few people test out our prototype.
• Received feedbacks.
• Change of concept from Augmented Reality to a Website for business owners.

Week 12:

• Third team stand up meeting.
• Evaluating our mobile app prototype.
• Finalizing the mobile app before final delivery.
• Finalizing and compiling the project documentation.
• Finishing the Promotional Material Website.

Week 13:

• Website for business owners completed. -Push notification for users/customers completed. -Promotional Material Website completed.
• Final prototype presentation.
• Project documentation completed.

Link to Working Prototype (Business Website): https://github.com/deco3500/TRIDENT/tree/master/Website/Website(Business)/html

Link to Working Prototype (Push Notification): https://github.com/deco3500/TRIDENT/tree/master/App_Prototype/ProjectAIM_final

Link to Promotional Material Website: https://github.com/deco3500/TRIDENT/blob/master/Website/ProductWebsite/index.html

Link to Project Documentation: https://github.com/deco3500/TRIDENT/blob/master/Project%20Documentation.pdf

Link to Important Folder Guide: https://github.com/deco3500/TRIDENT/blob/master/Important%20Folder%20Team%20Trident.pdf