BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17, 2015 – This week was a successful week for the team Kool Katz, consisting of the three developers, Laura Avakian, Seth Cannon, and Ryan Kiel. Kool Katz continued their development of the Civil War Driving Tour app and finished the high fidelity prototype.
Last week, the app was still more of a skeleton than something usable, and an evaluation plan had been created. The features were starting to take shape, but were not working together.
This week, Laura and Ryan finished up the prototype, which provides the basic functionality: displaying the tour sites, the details about the tour sites, a link to their website, a way to view them on the map, and the user comments page. The features are now not only working but are working together. There is still of course work to be done, but the extent to which the app has been developed is what qualifies this as being high fidelity.
Additionally, the team got in touch with the client, Paul Quigley, by email to touch base about the status of the project. They will be meeting within the next week or two, pending the team and client’s availability.
The team plans to interview the client on what he does and does not like about the app, but will be careful about using that feedback as the client is not the same as a general potential user. The client likely will give feedback from a different perspective, however, which will certainly be helpful.
“Now that we have something working, we can really focus on what the users want. The evaluation plan still needs some work but it will be instrumental in judging our success or lack of,” says Ryan.
Next week, the team, with recent feedback from Professor Luther, will refine the evaluation plan, and then will use it to interview potential users about what they like and do not like about the app itself. The potential users that were interviewed one month earlier for the contextual inquiry will likely be the target interviewees for the prototype. Doing so is a vital step to developing this app while keeping the users in mind as it is easy to.
Contact Laura Avakian at lavakian@vt.edu for any further inquiries.
