Meetings:

Nov 4th, 1:30 hrs:

All team members present and on time

Agenda:

• Status post day reflections

• Finish Nuf Analysis

• New Process communications guidelines

• Design/Research/Dev Touchpoints

Nov 7th, 2 hrs:

All team members present and on time

Agenda:

• Working Session

• Design/Research/Dev Touchpoints

• Persona review

Nov 11th, 45 min:

All team members present and on time

Agenda:

• Design/Research/Dev Touchpoints

• Finish Affinity mapping

• Review Desirability Study

  
  

Closed Tasks:

Audience Interviews: Alex & Nikki

Due Date: Nov 7th

Description: Based on our survey feedback, our team created an interview script and conducted 4 interviews. Out intention was to explore our potential user-base and understand how they use their calendars for scheduling. Additionally, we hoped to discover any pain points they may have.

Takeaways:

• A main frustration point of users when event planning was effectively planning events through text messages. Other conversations would clutter the discussion. 

• For photo uploading and sharing, people highly value convenience, quick file processing, and easy sharing access

• People tend to have separate calendars for work, school, and personal content

• Users were more likely to put 1 one 1 meetings and social events on their calendar if they are farther out on their calendar

Database Design Map: Anuj & Leah

Due Date: Nov 4th

Description: This was the next major qualitative deliverable before the next stage of development. In order for construction of our database to begin, it was important for our team to know the structure of our different database groups and how they will interact with one another.

Takeaways:

Devs had important discussion with whether or not we should have created events returned to the user’s calendar and only store minimal information in our database (such as not keeping track of time, since it would be covered by Google Calendar). We ended up deciding that for the short term we would store more information in our database to reduce external API calls. This will also preserve information in a more centralized place, which should give us easier access to things.

• We deliberated this point extensively, but it made far more sense since it gave us easier access to the information for business logic.

• We already had a Users table, so we setup an events table to connect to it. We also managed to decide on how to handle attendees to our events by creating a new table for them, then connecting them to a user and event.

Personas: Jill

Due Date: Nov 7th

Description: Based on survey data and audience interview responses, we developed two personas that represent different planning attitudes based on their student and work status. Mina is a full-time student with a part-time job who prioritizes time management to keep calm and organized. Piper is a recent graduate working a typical 9-5 job, so her weekend time is highly valuable as she is focused on work during the week.

Takeaways:

• Although our personas are close in age and share some values, the biggest differences are how these personas treat their calendars and free time.

• Notably, students prefer to view different calendar categories all at once, whereas those who have a full time job typically use entirely different apps to view their work calendar and personal calendar.

• As we design our task flows and wireframes, it is critical to empathize with both demographics and allow flexibility in how these users are accustomed to interacting with calendars.

NUF Analysis & Feature List: Everyone

Due Date: Nov 4th

Description: Utilizing our user research and our competitor analyses, our next goal was to distill all this information into actual features that we could potentially include in our application. This process also included a High/Low Effort & impact matrix in order to understand what features needed to be implemented first as well as a feature ranking to guide our development process.

Takeaways:

• Event creation will be complex; there are lots of moving pieces, asynchronous functions and business logic that need to be implemented in order to facilitate a working event creation system.

• We have a modular roadmap forward and must navigate dependencies; features relating to the core flow of event comparison and creation will take priority and will need to be completed first before other features dependent on them can be developed

• Our effort matrix will help guide design/development direction when there is debate on what feature needs to come next, facilitating a smoother process
  

Affinity Mapping: Alex, Jill

Due Date: Nov 7th

Description: Our affinity map aggregated data from our initial survey and 4 user interviews, dividing data into three major categories: Event Planning, Calendar & Scheduling Tools, and Photo Sharing.

Takeaways:

Juncture will cater to events that are planned but typically not multi-day. Participants don’t use calendar for longer trips that require involved planning.

• Text group chats are a pain point despite being the primary method of scheduling events & sharing related media

• Texting group chats are the primary method of scheduling group activities, but participants may not respond or forget event information.

• Group chats are also used for photo sharing, but have issues with file size limitations and slow loading times for iCloud link sharing.

• We do not have to account for events without a set time. If events do not have a set time, they do not go in the calendar.

Market Color Research: Nikki

Due Date: Nov 11th

Description: We conducted market research into popular calendar apps and the colors they have available for organization of events and tasks. We also researched color psychology and best practices of color in UI as documented by Google, Apple, and Atlassian

Takeaways:

• Have good contrast between colors

• Find a good balance between warm and cool colors

• Be aware of what color can symbolize – red means urgency and alerts, green is more positive and friendly, blue is tranquil, etc.

Desirability Study: Jill

Due Date: Nov 11th

Description: We created desirability study based on two artistic directions from previously completed moodboards. In our survey, participants review Image A and Image B, then select 5 terms from a list of 25 that best describe the images. The terms were selected from a list originally curated by Microsoft, which can be found here. We included 10 negative terms and 15 positive or neutral terms (as recommended in these guidelines) to ensure that users could express positive, neutral, and negative reactions.

Takeaways:

• After reviewing 54 responses, survey participants preferred the visual direction presented in Image A. All 3 top terms associated with Image A have positive connotations, while the top 3 terms associated with Image B have mixed connotations.

• For future design work, we should prioritize simple designs and shapes as not to overcomplicate the UI and utilize a gentle, streamlined color palette for UI elements.

Demo Taskflow Script: Leah

Due Date: Nov 7th

Description: In order to facilitate an efficient testing process while our team uses Expo Go, we drafted a comprehensive testing doc n order to distill the requirements and process for testing with Expo.

Takeaways:

• While we plan to move to TestFlight in the Winter term, Expo has made it easy for our team to quickly test basic functionality in our early dev process.

Database Construction: Anuj & Leah

Due Date: Nov 11th

Description: Our team needed to construct a database in order to built all of our business logic/features to make Juncture functional. This was a critical dependency that needed to be finished before other dev work could begin

Takeaways:

• We’ll use our database to create Juncture-specific events, so that we can include specific juncture-critical information, or future “social” features like photos.

• Additionally, for our database construction we realized that we will need a way to manage a user’s friends. As such, this is a continued development for the future of our database construction, but at the current point in time, we are comfortable with what we have.

Implement calendar UI with Nylas Integration: Anuj & Leah

Due Date: Nov 11th

Description: Our team needed to create a dummy UI for testing purposes so we could test features prior to our own design integrations.

Takeaways:

• Expo's WebBrowser and Linking modules simplify OAuth authentication and redirects.

• Using Nylas sync tokens with 3-second polling enables efficient real-time calendar updates.

• Used luxon, it simplifies timezone handling and date formatting in calendar events, making it more reliable than native JavaScript Date.

  

Open Tasks:

Pull user calendar into DB: Anuj & Leah

Due Date: Nov 15th

Description: We also needed to set up our database so that a user’s calendar data can be pulled from Nylas into our database so we can operate on it with business logic.

Takeaways:

• We realized that in the future, we want to setup a webhook, so that we don’t have to make as many API calls to Nylas, and so that we don’t manually have to sync the database. However, at this point this is not implemented.

• Storing calendar events in our databse will allow us to include custom fields should we need them.

  
  

New Tasks:

Journey Mapping: Alex, Nikki

Due Date: Nov 18th

Description: For this task we are outlining the flows of our two main personas to understand their experience with scheduling events and uploading photos.

Task Flows: Jill

Due Date: Nov 18th

Description: Outlining two main flows: Creating an event and Viewing event photos. These flows will document the decisions required to complete those tasks, and this will be referenced when making future designs.

Low-fi Sketches & Ideation: Alex, Durando, Jill, Nikki

Due Date: TBD

Description: Additionally we are planning on beginning official ideation as we work towards progress on a low-fi Figma prototype and will scope this at the conclusion of this meeting.

Retrieve Data from DB to show: Anuj & Leah

Due Date: Nov 16th

Description: Once data is in our database, we need to be able to pull it in order to implement business logic that we need for our features.

Calendar Comparison feature: Anuj, Leah

Due Date: Nov 30th

Description: For this task, we are focusing on the main aspect of our core flow of comparing someone's live calendar with another user. This task's success is also critical in order to built every major feature for our application and we have allocated lots of time for its implementation.