#striddle app

[striddleapp]

1st January 2015

Happy New Year!

We are now officially in 2015. What will be your one Social Media New Years Resolution?? If you want to have a new experience and organise your Twitter...why not download Striddle when we release it on the App Store at the end of January??

We have created our promotional trailer for Striddle. We wanted to create a trailer with an initial animated feature then it moves into real time footage. We researched other adverts to get a feel for how we wanted to showcase our app, you can view the trailer on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3q8aP0IZ-E

Over the holidays we have continued working through our technical document. We had separated our table of contents in to sections at the beginning of November and we assigned every Friday to working on through how we wanted to approach the content, designing our diagrams and tables etc. As both of us are working in separate countries over the holiday period we are writing the document using Google Documents. Once all elements are finished. We will format and proof read the final draft ready for submission on the 7th January.

[striddleapp]

8th December

So the last week has been about tidying up the app getting it ready for it's submission on the 10th.

We have had a significant problem with links in the Swipe-box plugin were using and finally  we solved it this week. Numerous attempts were made to get this working, we were afraid that this plugin may never have allowed us to do things we were trying todo. We emailed the creator to ask if what we were trying to do was even possible as this was an image plugin. He guided us in a direction to replace his gestures in the plugin with hammer.js. This was the little nudge that pushed us in the right direction to solving these issues. Links can now be tapped on the device and the inApp browser loads our web intents and the necessary content in the app. 

If we had more time we would rather not use web intents for our tweet functionality but with the scope and project timeline, it wasn't something that was possible for us.

Swipe navigation has been added to the app,this allows the user to swipe between pages as well as having the choice to use the navigation menu.

All List Functionality is implemented including Subscribed Lists.

If a user has no lists we have an automatic message as a guide that displays until you create a list. You can access this tip using the tooltip in the segmented control at anytime.

Here you can see the subscribed list is a grey colour to differentiate between Lists that you have made and Lists you have subscribed to.

A view details button in the segmented control allows the user to view members, unsubscribe to these lists.

Here you can create a list using the Form. Below you can see the edit list feature.

Testing feedback showed us that instructions may be needed as a simple gesture guide at the beginning of the app. We set to work on creating illustrations for a modal window in our login page. This gives users the choice to view the instructions and then sign in.

We have old tweets loading in the build but it was effecting our scroll action so it was a choice to leave it out of this build. We know that we have the functionality but we don't have enough time to solve to issue that came with it so rather than include this glitch we left it out.

We are also getting ready for the DIT Showcase on Dec 11th, here we present our project with staff members of DIT and industry. We had to create a promotional banner and web image for the event.

Retouches to retina based images are being made now and final touches are being implemented in the app. The end is Nigh.......

[striddleapp]

28th November

Since last Friday we have made a lot of small changes in the build that have lead to much better functionality. Slight adjustments were made to the size of the squares to allow more room within the text based tweets, a minor change but has lead to better viewing of content in our grid. We were having issues with images stretching within the squares another bug that has been remedied. In the display of Lists, users had to tap the avatar to be brought to a certain list this was fixed by css adjustments and further styling.

A tooltip has been added to the segmented control on the Lists page with information about List creation. We felt that this was a useful add in to guide users that have never used lists before. We are working on making this an auto display message when a user has no lists. Currently we are trying to figure how to target the empty area and load the message dynamically. During our testing sessions last week we noticed that a lot users were accidentally tapping the compose a tweet button when they were trying to press the +Make a List button in the segmented control. We needed to adjust the spacing in the css to avoid this.  

Testing has proved that our square layout was the popular grid of choice with our users. Results showed that  60% voted on squares and 40% on our original diamond layout. This testing has allowed us to iterate and justify the changes we have made in Striddle. When we began designing for the app we focused on a diamond theme, it was represented in a lot of our ui, icons and brand, with changes made from testing we decided to approach the Striddle logo slightly differently still maintaining original properties. An subtle injection of colour was also added to the app. After trying different colours, the winner was a teal green. You can see this in our app icon and splash page now

On Monday & Tuesday we were focusing on getting our build ready to send out on Test flight. We recruited testers and sent out build 1.1  on Tuesday and Today, we also sent a user experience and functionality survey to those testers. We are now waiting on feedback and have already started work on build 1.2. We have implemented new gestures inside the app which plan to include in the next build.

We also have been making strides with attacking our swipe-box link problems, we may have targeted our issue. Watch this space.

[striddleapp]

November 8th

Since our last post we have been working on creating the functionalities of our lists page. We have our lists loading and we have implemented the first round of styling here. We have the avatar of the person who created the list the title of List, it's description and the number of members within this list. Katie has been working hard on the create a list function and we now have a form that allows the user to make a list from inside the app. There is currently a working search input to search twitter for potential members of your lists. We are working on the code that allows us to put that member inside list. 

We have applied styling to the form entry and we have also changed the media tweet gallery to be the same as the text tweet gallery.

We had a testing session on 31st October  & 6th November testing our 3rd build with our 3 different layouts, our new swipe-box styling and the first introduction of our lists. Feedback has been has been taken on and we plan to make changes in our 4th Build. Squares are proving to be more popular but people still want the option of diamonds so we plan to kepp this layout but make squares the default. Also we plan to introduce hints of colour. We have feedback from 60 Testers at this stage so we feel we are on the right with creating a design people want.

We've started dedicating every Friday to our Thesis document, we are creating our contents and formatting all our information from this blog.