The prototyping stage has been the step that I have felt most connected to thus far. I’ve been finding it much easier to go through this process now that we are actually building from our ideas and previous research. That being said, I still have some reservations about moving forward.
My group and I still tend to become wrapped up in ideas for our product that we would want ourselves, rather than coming up with ideas rooted in our research and Middle-Class Miranda’s needs. For example, when coming up with features for our app, a few of us wanted to incorporate more community building aspects, such as connections with other apartments through the apps. However, we were pulled back in to the original focus by reminding ourselves that community building is not one Miranda’s priorities – she is busy enough as it is, and needs a place to organize her many activities, elements of home life, and existing social interests.
We ultimately decided on an app that will allow for a common platform within a housing unit, such as an apartment complex. Inspired by blackboard, we envision the app to serve as a unique portal for an apartment complex to share information between individual housing groups and apartment wide networks. For our prototype, we are designing the app itself. Cole introduced us to a neat program that allows us to design the app, and it even creates live links to other sections within the app. We began the design for our prototyping in class, then continued later that night to finish.
We quickly realized that our prototype was going to require more work than we initially thought. We organized our app in to categories of payments, personal and roommate calendars, amenity requests, space reservations, and a directory. Each of these categories has sub categories as well; for example, in the roommate category, users can assign chores, or share schedules with each other so their common living spaces can be shared in an organized manner, which is something Miranda needs. With so many different purposes that this app is taking on, we are all concerned that we may be tackling too much for the short amount of time that we have. Because of this, and because three out of our four group members were leaving town for the weekend, we requested an extension for our final prototype.
This being said, I like our idea, and I like all of the elements that we are including. I can imagine it being a real platform that would be useful in an undergraduate life-style. However, I have a feeling that our idea is not very original, and several other groups are designing apps for undergraduates as well. This makes me feel a little apprehensive – I already feel as if we should have chosen a different population to design for, because I think that choosing the undergraduate population was a common choice among my peers. With that, I need to continue to work on getting over it – this has been our idea for a couple months now. Also, it’s becoming easier to be at ease with the idea now that I’ve found that I really like our product, and I believe we have a good product that came from the previous processes.