AAD II, Assignment 2- Carpentry and surveys

 So, you've decided to make an app to share books.  What, how and who are the next decisions you need to make.

What! What to call it.  After having a revelation at 3am that Omlet was the perfect name, and could be used an acronym I thought this was easy.  After brain storming with Noah about what Omlet could stand for I realized that 3am ideas were not always great.  I wanted to stick with O so OLE was born, the Online Literary Exchange.  The military gives you skills to make words fit to acronyms!

How was dictated to a certain extent by one of the assignment criteria, use Figma.  This is nice because we don't need to learn coding (HTML/CSS/Java/etc) but it is a bit more involved than mechanisms like Carrd that I used for the previous assignment.  Figma develops an understanding of the relations and mechanisms needed for an effective application.

Who took a lot more work.  Luckily I took a year long program in equipment procurement that had a human factors course and a survey course so I was able to throw things together for the survey.  The human factors for weapon systems are not 100% transferable to a book app.

During the break I contacted around 15 people with four questions:

Would you like to read more by exchanging or borrowing physical books?

Would you  like to volunteer to deliver books to people who don't have access to them?

What is your age range, in ten year increments, for example 40 to 49?

What gender do you identify as?

Most people with positive responses were over 30 years (4), the biggest majority were over 60 (6).  Most people volunteering 40 to 59 years, married, with an edge in females (6 vs 2).  I think most would respond positively, but actual people willing to do the work would be less.  It's still a good response though.

This let me build two personas.

Beth, a 62 year old, recently retired professional who spends summers here and moves away during the winter.  She would be willing to deliver books.  Beth is based on real person I interviewed.

Anthony is based on target user.  He is disabled and on AISH.  His imcome is very low, around 1200 per month, and lives in subsidized housing.  He relies on local transit to get around and is user of the library.

 These two people are somewhat idealized but can used to outline the functions needed in the application.

 

I made sketches with the basic screens I thought I would need, nine of them.  Building these frames was some interesting carpentry, but I think a strong frame makes a strong structure.  Once I've got that done I moved on to working in Figma!  See you soon.