Project Proposal

Project Proposal




 Usage Scenario
The possible usage scenarios for our application are
User A, a graduate student in the School of Computing needs to plan a research meeting with his research group and wants to maximize the attendance in this meeting. He uses the app on his phone to "Compare Calendars" and determines the free slot that works best for most people. User B, an international graduate student in Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering wants to form a Conversational English group that could meet on Thursday evenings. User C, a graduate student in the Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences department has heard of a car pooling program on campus. He wants to connect with people who have similar class hours around his location. He logs into the forum on the app and posts a query asking other app users if they are interested and gets responses. User D, a graduate student at CU-ICAR needs to get a better plan for his day. He logs into the app and adds a list of things that are due for the day.
Objectives
Graduate students would most often need to work with peers to participate in collaborative research and everyone wants to do it   in their own time. Using the "compare calendar" functionality in the project, it would easier for them to find common times to catch up on things and work together. Trying to maintain a state of mental homeostasis is essential for Grad students. They want to indulge in social events or pursue hobbies. By empirical studies we ascertained that these activities are mostly done with friends; so the project has a functionality to discover friends who share common interests. The application also allows the users to keep tab of what tasks need to be achieved is a seen as an effective way to working towards a goal. So the application provides a hassle-free to-do list with reminders based on the priority set by the user.
Many a times we wish we had a close knit forum for many things that matter to us, like finding the best pizza place with student offers within a distance or like finding accommodation or posting general queries. The application provides a forum of the app users in the university who can be targeted based on interest. So questions can be more contextual and answers hence more relevant. 

How will it be used?
We envision this solution to be available on Smart Phones and tablets. We are building this to be touchscreen friendly. Hence most interaction as of now, will be built and optimized for touch input

Where do you imagine the technology/activity being utilized?
 Much of the solution is fit to an academic scenario; the objectives as listed above are specifically targeting some needs of graduate students. 
 However it is not limited to grad students since we are not limiting functionality to them in anyway. We are addressing needs of graduate students but these needs may be shared by any academic user, not just graduate students. 
 We are looking to make the system usable and engaging to any campus clubs that seek to enrich the student experience; such as Redfern's CAPS or Clemson Area International Friendship etc which may be instrumental in making the forum functionality more meaningful and useful to students


Potential Outcome and Significance
What is the importance of what you are building?
 Studies that we have reviewed indicate that graduate students in universities face varied levels and manners of stress, isolation, anxiety and related health degradation. Most often these are linked to the kind of work and life balance that these students tend to keep. 
Our surveys and interviews confirm many of these findings and provide insights on how some graduate students deal with stress, isolation and anxiety.
Inspired by these studies our solution aims at some of these problems if not all. 

What problem does your project solve?
 Stress, Anxiety, Isolation are faced by Graduate student. These problems can be solved by friends.

Target audience
Describe the psychographic traits of your target demographic.
 Demographic (e.g., age, gender)
The typical age groups that we would like to serve with our app are graduate students between the age of 18-25. Our Primary market will be the students of Clemson University. We have tried to design the app so that people of all ethnic and cultural back ground are benefited.
Behavioral (e.g., interests, lifestyle)
We will target students who are both introverts and extroverts by helping them socialize and enable them to manage time and tasks efficiently.


Design & Justification
We initially designed the application as an IOS based interface, but we think it can easily be modified to fit an android system. It has all the classic features available of a touch screen interface such as swiping motion to change certain screen elements. We would like to use the usability principles and Norman design principles to efficiently design the interface to make it user friendly and intuitive. Use of skeuomorphism as seen in many IOS apps can be incorporated to give a natural interactive environment to the user. All the screens will have standardized menus and access to the different parts of the application. Standardizing and maintaining consistency would create a sense of familiarity and belonging amongst the users. We would like to provide flexibility to the user while using the app. All the design features would simplify the process of interaction and reduce frustration among the users.

Technical 
What resources are necessary to complete your project?
 We plan to use HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and also a responsive design framework.
What will it look like?
  It will be probably be a web based application with all the features as seen in a typical application. We would like to make it simple to use with not many cluttered buttons and menus and yet not lose the functionality of the website.
What piece will you NOT build at this time?
We will not be developing Forums as of now. We might try to implement it later.


What is your timeline for development? 
We would lie to iteratively refine our prototype during the building process and evaluate the design. We think that we will have a functional application by the first week of December 2013.


Initial ideas - Final week of August
Literature Review - First week of September
Requirements analysis - Second Week of September
Objectives, how-might-we - Third week of September
Storyboarding - Final week of September
Paper Prototyping - Second week of October
Usability tests - Third week of October
Go through HTML5/CSS3 tutorials - Final Week of October
Make a scratch site - Second week of November
Discuss Scratch site interactions- Second week of November
Iterative development - Through first week of December
Finishing touches,Submission - Second week of December



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