This week has been a nightmare for me. It is highly due to CS3216 assignment 1 where our project was given a "yellow card" by Colin as not "interesting" application.
I understand the fact that our application has a number of loop holes in term of design and user experience. However, it gives me an impression that "Cool" and "Awesome" take up a very large part of an application. Let me explain why I think in such a way.
Firstly, given a very short time, we need to rush out a working product. My target is to create a small yet working and stable product. Therefore, our application may not have any really very "cool" features. Our application focus on add, group, collate and simple search photo. It seems very simple. Our front end is slightly lagging behind time. Hence, the feel of the application may not be that fantastic. It may not be able to deliver the intended function to the user. This is the first reason why I mean front end need to be awesome. Front end needs to be able to portray the features before the user will use it.
Next, I scanned through applications from other group. Quite a number of their application have fantastic design, they put in lots of hard work in designing their application. However, in less than 4 days away from submission, some of the features are still not available or still buggy. To me, 4 days is too short to implement features yet ensuring the features are free of bug but the module gives me an impression that it speaks otherwise. I am not sure whether the teaching team believes that the students are capable of fixing those problems in 4 days or it is meant to have some bug given a short period to produce those applications. In return, awesomeness and coolness can "cover up" the short fall of those bugs.
I hope that for the upcoming assignments, my doubt on "unimportant" backend can be cleared as I still believe without a strong backend, frontend cannot do much as well. It is like a fancy speech without content. Let's hope... it does not prove me otherwise...
Hmmm my previous comment seems to have been swallowed up somewhere.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question, buginess will kill any coolness in your app.
As for Feeed, the unfortunate thing about it is that, if you look at it objectively, it is a complete failure as a food review app. At the point I was reviewing it, there was no star rating, which you've now added. However even now it's a pretty awful food review site because although you allow the user to enter a restaurant name, there's no way to enter an address.
So if I saw a restaurant review I like, I would have to Google up the location. There's also no pricing information, which is crucial for a food review app.
As I said to your team after the lecture the other day; look at Hungry Go Where for an idea of how to build a decent food review app.
Your apps issue isn't that the front end isn't fancy or that it lacks "cool features". Your app's issue is that it lacks many many features to actually make it useful.
That is, it lacks _BASIC_ features.
I told your team this when they approached me.
I think you should take a step back, be honest with yourself, and rate Feeed objectively as a food review site.
Sorry, I do feel bad slamming Feeed publicly on your blog. Unfortunately it's my job to ensure that all of you level up, and the only way to do that is to be honest with you.
ReplyDelete"When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore that means they’ve given up on you…you may not want to hear it but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you and want to make you better.”
-- Randy Pausch
Haha, it is ok. I do learn something through hard and VERY VERY painful process. My post is more like a ranting. However, I do think that to some extent frontend "portray" better than backend due to its nature, backend cant be seen physically and human are visual inclined. If a feature is buggy, unless user encounter it, it is not considered and discovered as buggy. However, with a bad UI, user will slam and delete/quit/uninstall. Frontend is very important in attracting first time visitors.
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