timofei7
commented
6 months ago as you know, love the project. wish you all went a bit further on the sliders - not quite enough controls - i know that would require reworking the scoring completely but seemed like you all got a bit stuck on that part in term 2. today, daily has run out so it is just a blank page. photos load a bit slowly - should have used cloudinary would have been more optimized. overall you all did a good job but didn't really push yourselves to the max, ya know. i'm really hopeful that you all keep working on this as it could really be cool with what feels like just a little bit more!
Final Project Report
Summary/Debrief
We are all exceedingly proud of the final Slider project. The website has a smooth UI, and a simplicity that tested really well, especially among the photographer demographic we aimed for. The game is not too difficult nor too easy, and there is still significant room for growth. Ultimately, the regrets we have are more about the process. Code organization (especially the Redux) helped everyone contribute to the code a lot more and enabled a lot more features, but we did not implement it until the last week. Our committment to a dedicated weekly PM also was not held up effectively, which led to more of a sprint-and-relax schedule than a continuous productive schedule. Of course, it was also often very helpful to be able to moderate our workload depending on our other courses and responsibilities -- but for our project, consistency would have been best.
Validation
In our proposed validation, we decided to validate our product by having getting users to play Slider.fun and get their feedback using a Google Form, which asked questions such as "How did you find the usability of our product" and "How likely would you recommend this to a friend". With these questions, we had users rate it on a 1 to 5 scale. We did this in two stages: during the end of Term 1 at Technigala, as well as at the end of Term 2 where we broadened our audience and promoted Slider.fun on random online forums. Additionally, at the end of Term 2, we utilized Google Analytics to view how many times users had viewed our page. Moreover, during our second stage, we implemented the feature which allowed users to create an account with Slider.Fun to keep track of their playing history. Using this feature, we were able to see how many users wanted to create an account with us, and additionally, how often these users would come back and play slider. From Google Analytics, we found that we had 2611 views of our page within the span of the 2 weeks that we started tracking this metric, which did not include development server use but did include some of our own playing time. Of those views, we had 98 users create an account with Slider.Fun, which was a huge success. The median number of daily challenges played was 4 games. Additionally, we got 82 uploaded photos on our site. This means that our website is working, people are playing it, and to some extent, some users are revisiting our website as well. From our User Response survey, we found that most users found our game enjoyable and would recommend playing it to a friend. However, a big critique that we got both in our Term 1 and Term 2 responses was that the game would be more enjoyable if some kinks were worked out, ie. make Slider.Fun playable on Safari and not just Chrome.
Potential Next Steps
There is significant room for improvement, despite the success we had. The most practical change, though it would require significant coding overhaul, would be the implementation of more advanced, photographer-specific sliders like tint, temperature, and color grading with curves. There is also a lot of room for growth with regard to the social aspect -- allowing users to pin photos, see other profiles, and other engagement aspects. Ultimately, however, these changes could also be seen as detracting from the simplicity of the wordle-like daily format. If we were to implement these changes, we all agree that the daily puzzle would have to be centered more. That is, the game is centered around the puzzle, with everything else as a peripheral engagement for those that wish to do more. An analogy would be Instagram: there is significant opportunity for deep and complex engagement, but the star is the main feed, and we expect the users to spend most of their time scrolling on the main feed or the explore feed. We want users to spend most of their time on the daily puzzle or on the community puzzles, not on inter-user engagement.
Final Takeaways
Ultimately, we are satisfied with our project. I feel we learned a lot about organization and planning especially, and effective ways to chunk work loads. We also learned a lot about the whole process of designing, planning, building, and reworking a significant project. In a second iteration, the full-time assignment of a project manager would have been very beneficial. For the future, we hope to continue working on this project, as there seemed to be enough interest in a full-form version to see it through. Specifically, some group members hope to implement the advanced photo-editing sliders discussed above. Though there is no hard deadline, we would try to complete this by the end of the spring, when we all graduate. The class as a whole was wonderful. The experience of building a project with a team of peers, in an environment where we are expected not just to produce but to learn the entire time, was an extremely rewarding one. While it was often challenging to navigate the freedom we had, it taught invaluable skills about project management and what it takes to see a complex project through to the end. We especially enjoyed the class time at the beginning of the first term, and the communal feeling of the working sessions and Technigala, which was unique for a computer science course at Dartmouth.
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