Tag: j5

Blacksburg, Va., April 17, 2015 – After evaluating their application, J5 has released a report to the public on their findings!

Team member Daniel Rusz said “We conducted an evaluation of our App and received very helpful results on the usability of our application from the users who tested our application”.

J5 selected six participants that were interested in the Gaming Social Network and had them run through various tasks to see which features were good and where they could improve. In their report, they include several examples of important fixes to the prototype that their users wanted to see before the application launched.

Team member Lucas Eckert said “We had to evaluate the matchmaking aspect of our application and we learned about some key features we should implement”.

J5 ran simulations of two new users adding each other on the Gaming Social Network and then selected a game to play together with the evaluation participants. They found that the volunteers generally enjoyed the fact that they could play with other local gamers that they had not had a chance to meet in person.

With the prototype tested by the public, J5 will edit their application to meet the expectations of their users before they give a presentation on Monday, May 5th at the Moss Arts Center.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert

Blacksburg, Va., April 17, 2015 – J5 has completed and released a high fidelity prototype of the Gaming Social Network for others to test and evaluate!

J5’s Gaming Social Network application prototype will allow users to have a hands-on experience and get to test out some of the main features of the app.

Team member Daniel Rusz said “We wanted the prototype to give us insight on what features were easy to use and what we needed to refine. This way we don’t have to make major back end changes when creating the final product”.

J5 plans to use this prototype to get feedback from a select group of testers that will run through the application and complete set tasks. The feedback they receive will help the team know how well their features work in practice and the final product can be modified to better meet their goals.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “We are simulating the social interactions users will have right now, but after listening to our testers responses and perfect our front end design before continuing”.

The final stages of development left for J5 is to add in their application’s networking capabilities. Although users can only interact with sample friends in this prototype, the final product will allow users to communicate with one another to establish the social network. The final product will be presented in front of an audience on May 4th at the Moss Arts Center!

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., April 10, 2015 – J5 has written up an evaluation plan for the Gaming Social Network as well as continuing their design of their final prototype.

J5 wrote their evaluation plan this week in preparation of prototype testing. They are asking volunteers to run through a series of tasks and provide feedback and constructive criticism.

Team member Daniel Rusz said “Our evaluation plan is done and we are looking forward to meeting with volunteers to test our prototype”.

Additionally, J5 have been continuing work on the User Interface for their prototype and have made significant progress in that regard. Specifically, the profile and matchmaking screens are done.

Team member Parham Ghazanfari said “We met up to discuss how to go about doing the user interface. From our design patterns, we created the core screens that will enable the user to seamlessly and easily view friend and profile data”.

This coming week, the J5 team will be hard at work finishing a functional high-fidelity prototype so that the public can see what it will eventually look like and maybe even get to try it out!

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., April 3, 2015 – J5 has begun their final prototype for the gaming social network!

J5 has already planned out the schedule for development of the Final Prototype in an effort to make development as smooth as possible. Team member Iyaz Shaikh believes that planning is a key component to the swift and successful development of the app.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “We feel that a successful team project should have a solid schedule for development in order to avoid complications and crunch time. For each week we have planned out the features we want to implement.”

J5 also began looking past the prototype at various development options:

“We want to use a cross-platform development framework so in the future we will be able to expand the use of our application.”

As most of the major planning deadlines have come and gone, J5 has begun to hit their stride in the development of their application. “We are excited to begin implementing a real working prototype” said J5 team member Parham Ghazanfari.

For the next few weeks, the main focus for the team is going to be the actual development of the application as well as testing and debugging. Most of the team’s efforts so far have been put towards researching and designing the application.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., Mar. 20, 2015 – J5 has completed a Go/ No Go presentation and has a clear plan for the weeks ahead!

J5 met to plan for their Go/ No Go Presentation in order to discuss the project and finalize a plan for the Gaming Social Network Project. Their presentation fully explained the current prototype and where the team plans to go next.

Team member Lucas Eckert said “The presentation was great as it allowed our team to get some helpful feedback from our peers.”

During the presentation, J5 found that the audience had quite a few good suggestions for the quality of the app. Specifically, there were suggestions that were geared towards improving functionality and UI design.

Team member Parham Ghazanfari said “One suggestion I really liked was adding different options for reporting users that exhibited toxic behavior instead of just giving them a thumbs down. That would allow others to see what they were reported for, rather than just being reported.”

In order to evaluate their product, J5 decided to plan a heuristic evaluation. Once the prototype is complete, they will ask volunteers to run through their application completing tasks and giving feedback. This will allow them to see if their app holds up to the standards of well known and popularly used heuristics.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “A heuristic evaluation shows us where our app’s strengths and weaknesses are. It allows us to look at areas such as aesthetics and UI consistency/flexibility to see if those parts of our app are well designed or if they need to be changed.”

With the Go/No-go presentation complete, J5 now plans to refine and polish the UI and begin researching the back end networking code for their app!
J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., Mar. 20, 2015 – J5 has developed their initial prototypes for the Gaming Social Network!

To begin developing their application prototypes, J5 met together to brainstorm multiple design ideas. After discussing their ideas, J5 decided on the five best design ideas to sketch as low fidelity prototypes.

Team member Daniel Rusz said “We should consider making the prototypes that focus on different features so we can decide what design is best”.

Team member Parham Ghazanfari said “I will draw the sketches”. Surprisingly enough, he did draw the sketches and they were integral to coming up with the low fidelity designs for the application.

J5 built designs that range from mobile applications that focus on finding nearby gamers to web applications focused on finding friends with similar gaming interests.

Team member Lucas Eckert said “Design number two seems to meet our target audience’s needs the most so we should make that into a higher fidelity prototype”.

Out of their five design decisions J5 came up with, their second design was chosen as their best option. This design was a mobile application that shows the user nearby gamers and gives the user the option to make contact with these people based on their interests.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “The mobile prototype was chosen specifically because of the ease of use and intended flow of the application. The app is supposed to allow the user to quickly and easily find friends and we felt the mobile prototype was best for that”.

J5 completed their initial prototyping and are now ready to finalize the design and polish out any flaws with their application.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., Mar. 6, 2015 ­

J5 has completed its contextual inquiry, contextual analysis, and requirements extraction!

With all the excitement surrounding the development of The Gaming Social Network, people were literally lined up to be interviewed for the Contextual Inquiry(1) phase of development.

Team member Daniel Rusz said “It’s important to consider what the users want out of our system so that they will enjoy using it when it is released”.

In addition to considering what the user wants, the contextual inquiry phase also helps J5 to prioritize features based on what the user deems important.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “An application like this can include a limitless number of features. It’s important to prioritize our efforts on the ones that the users deem important rather than ones they won’t use or care about”.

After the contextual inquiry, J5 began their analysis phase to produce a work activity affinity diagram. This diagram helps to visualize how all of the features of the application should be organized.

Team member Parham Ghazanfari said “Our WAAD helped us create our design requirements”.

Using the work activity affinity diagram, J5 was able to extract the design requirements for the system. The design requirements are used by the developers to prioritize certain features that coincide with design ideas.

Now that the design requirements are done, J5 is ready to begin the initial prototyping for their application.

1) ­ The contextual inquiry is the phase in which the developers interview potential users about what they would like to see in the application.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., Feb. 27, 2015 ­ J5 has completed its comprehensive project plan to develop the Gaming Social Network!

In order to work efficiently and complete their project in a reasonable amount of time, J5 has developed a project plan to work on certain stages of their development on a week to week basis.

Team member Daniel Rusz said “It’s easier to tackle a project of this size when its broken down into smaller tasks each week”.

The team will begin their contextual inquiry next week and move onto their analysis shortly afterwards. The contextual inquiry is the design phase that consists of gathering data for what features their audience is looking for and the analysis will determine how they will make use of the data that was collected.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “Our prototype will make it easy to see what features we need to include”.

After their analysis is complete, J5 will begin constructing prototypes of their application. The purpose of building a prototype is to visualize how the application will be designed and what features they will include. The team plans to construct several prototypes of varying depth to ensure that the overall layout works well without developing every feature in detail.

Team member Lucas Eckert said “We can evaluate our prototypes easily by letting a new user test how intuitive the application is to use”.

Once the prototype is made, J5 plans to use beta testers to attempt using the basic features of the system without being walked through. J5 will know whether their application is intuitive and useful or not depending on the data they gather from these initial users.

Now that J5 has their plan in place, they are ready to begin their contextual inquiry and work at a good pace until the development is complete.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., Feb. 12, 2015 ­

J5 has completed its competitive analysis and literature review for the Gaming Social Network!

The goal of the competitive analysis was to see what other services are out there that are similar to the Gaming Social Network and how do they compare. J5 found ten different services that provide similar features to this network and rated them on a scale from one to five on how well they met J5’s criteria.

Team member Daniel Rusz said, “We can see which services compete with our own and judge how significant our competition is”.

By viewing the score that each service received, J5 can determine where they need to excel in order to surpass their strongest competitors. This is highly useful information that is necessary to know in order to make this application successful.

J5’s literature review provided them with many useful resources to help them design their application. We have reports that their sources range from social network analysis to mobile application design.

Team member Parham Ghazanfari said “It seems like we’ve got enough information to start our contextual inquiry.”

The competitive analysis and literature review provided a significant amount of information regarding the features their network should include as well as how the network should be constructed. They also provided significant insight on how mobile databases should be maintained as well.

Team member Iyaz Shaikh said “It’s important to consider more than just the core functionality of our app. We also have to consider the potential complications of maintaining a database of user profiles as well as a network.”

Now that J5 has the competitive analysis and literature review behind them, they can begin focusing on what their target audience wants and expects from the Gaming Social Network.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together” Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Blacksburg, Va., Feb. 12, 2015 – Four Seniors studying Computer Science begin development on a Social Networking app that aims to “bring gamers together.”

With video games on the rise, the size of online communities based around them are increasing dramatically each day. Today we have so many different avenues for people to play such as mobile gaming, PC gaming through Steam and League of Legends, and console games for the Xbox One, PS4, and Wii U. We also have many more people playing these games. For instance, League of Legends has a playerbase of 27 million people. In addition, mobile gaming has taken the world by storm, with over 152 million people in North America and 742 million people in the Asian/Pacific area playing mobile games. With these statistics in mind, it is safe to say that gaming is now a more socially acceptable hobby.

Gaming communities are made up of people of all ages, all over the world. But despite the increase in popularity, some still associate gamers with certain personality quirks like being anti-social or “nerdy.” Therefore, it is not the most common talking point among strangers.

J5 Team member Iyaz Shaikh, hopes that the team can work around that stereotype.

“People tend not to talk about gaming because of the stigma associated with it. We want to give people an easy way to meet other gamers with similar interests without having to feel weird about asking if they game.”

The team seeks to blend the social aspect of online games with local day-to-day relationships. With the internet being so readily available to everyone, interacting online has become a popular way to meet new people. J5 wants to harness this power to help gamers connect to each other.

Team member Lucas Eckert sees the potential to bring the friendships from the internet to your door; so you are not only playing games with new people, but meeting up and having dinner with them too.

“Usually gamers meet solely over the internet but they are still developing real friendships. The nature of a team based game lends itself to be the perfect ice breaker: Members of the team have a topic of discussion, a common goal and are doing something together they enjoy.”

With this in mind, J5 is developing a new application that will make it easier than ever for local gamers to find each other and play. The Gaming Social Network is new mobile application that will find other people in your area that are interested in the same games.

Team member Daniel Rusz believes “This is a great way for gamers to be social”.

Users will be able to make new friends in their area with the same interests, leading to a better gaming and social experience for everyone.

Team member Parham Ghazanfari stated “All of the J5 members are gamers and we want to make an application that even we would use.”

J5 have currently formed a group of highly interested, motivated computer science students to begin development. The team has shared ideas and researched what features the application will need to entice their audience and motivate new people to use it. The next step in the process will be constructing the design plan for the layout of the specific features in the application.

When this application is complete, people will find it easier than ever before to find friends in their area to game with.

J5 – “Let’s Play Together”

Contact person: Lucas Eckert <lucase93@vt.edu>

Related Articles: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/league-of-legends-now-boasts-27-million-daily-players/1100-6417374/

http://www.statista.com/statistics/297874/number-mobile-gamers-region/