T1 Summary

[tatetoussaint]

T1 Summary

Summary

Summarize any feedback you got during demos.

People seem to enjoy the idea of long form communication and many mentioned that they would like to write more letters, and that they would like more personalization. Navigation through the app seemed clear to most people with some small issues with the carousel in the using themes but selected fonts and themes quickly without much thought.

Observations

Record your observations and any insights/conclusions you may have about them. Identify top patterns and write them up. Record the number of email signups you got.

• Carousel scroll format is confusing to some people
• Theme screen does not look like it is scrollable -- people needed to be told that there were more themes
• Writing on compose screen is not great
• People enjoy opening letters (maybe make this experience even more enjoyable)
  • Can we add an animation to this?
• People like the parchment theme the most
• Home screen is kind of ugly and the mailbox doesn't actually make that much sense... are you actually standing in front of your mailbox to read letters, then putting them back inside? Could overhaul home screen to look like desk with inkwell, etc
• Navigation bar buttons seem to be clear without labels
• lowercase Qwill? (people saying Q-Will)
• fix button clicking glitches if button clicked while await in backend
• make themes higher contrast or different colors (stars)
• add sign in and sign out screen headers
• People really want more personalization -- people seem to really want stickers, so that's a good place to start, but we should also focus on adding a way for people to make custom drawings as stickers

Analysis

Is there any analysis you can do of the demos - what percentage of users claimed X or Y. If you had numerical answers was there any statistical significance to the answers?

Notes To Future Us

Leave notes to yourself for next term - what should your next steps be?

• Next Steps
  • Overhaul home screen -- if we're going to go with skeuomorphic design, we need to commit a little harder
  • Improve continuity of the UI
    • Try new stuff in figma
    • make sure it works on all devices (no hardcoding)
  • Add more people to font creation - (Rachael and Tommy for sure)
  • Prioritize stickers and stamps -- people really want that personalization!
  • Animations.
  • Make people more goal-oriented with well-defined objectives for every week

TeamWork

Reflect on how your team is working together

• Better communication, scheduling earlier and hopefully finding a consistent meeting time to do Sprint Reviews every week

What has been working well?

give kudos and shoutouts, comment on communication techniques that have worked, pr review practices, etc

• Tate made the backend!
  • Tate's a great teammate! (sarcasm)
• Leah did a lot of frontend
  • she handled the entire navigation and built out a lot of screens
• Tommy did a lot of frontend too even though he thought he would be bad at it
  • and Figma even though he's terrible at art
• Rachael making good progress on synthetic handwriting even though working with a different environment than rest of us!!

What has not?

try to discuss any problems openly and respectfully. communication breakdowns? are some teammembers taking others tasks for themselves? is anybody ghosting? etc

• people have not been doing the expected work all the time because the deadlines are not really existent -- we need to set concrete deadlines for ourselves/ specific group members
  • We said at the beginning of the term that it's okay to have busy weeks, but we need people to be honest and communicative about not being able to do work, and people haven't really been doing that (accountability)
• Communication has sometimes been lacking between the team
  • the 24 hour deadline for responding on slack has not been enforced! -- maybe we need to have people get the slack app on their phones teehee
• WE ARE SO BAD AT USING THE ZENHUB! We need to make a couple issues for everybody AT the standup when they say what they'll be doing for the week

Steps

if there are problems, think of some ways to resolve them, go back to your team contract from last term to see what you said you would do for resolution

• We would like to revisit the contract as a team week 1.
• Be better at ZenHub

[nataliesvoboda]

Congrats on finishing this term with a solid MVP! Was great to see the app running fairly smoothly at Technigala. Loving to see the feedback you got from users. Since you mention you’d like to use Zenhub more, can you get specific first with which featured you’re hoping to tackle, and what user feedback you will consider? The start of next term will be on V2 of the Figma prototype, so you will have the chance to simplify some of the areas that users were confused by. I’d like for you all to think through the experience of reading old letters. Especially since people won’t Archive reliably. Could something get archived automatically once it’s replied to? What does the Archive experience look like, if you’re designing for skeuomorphic? Can you pinch to zoom in/out between people and their individual letters to you? Just some ideas to get that part really smooth.