###Welcome to the Moose Pirates Repository!
This is the design space for our upcoming project, the MooseNews plugin and mobile application, currently a website prototype. It aims to add personalised news articles to your home page using key words that can be shared with friends.
Promotional Material https://youtu.be/_ovekl7zcZk
The Prototype http://188.166.212.124/deco3500/moose-pirates/test.php Without signing in, you can use the news keywords, but the friends system requires you to create an account.
Background The average person is bombarded with both articles and clickbait when they attempt to find news, most of which often bears no relevance or interest to them. MooseNews is a plugin to Google Chrome that offers a personalised collaborative news experience for the future. It transforms your New Tab page into a personal hub of information with convenient links to your favourite websites. The news MooseNews provides is based on keywords you set and remove at any time in order to fully personalise the news displayed. MooseNews also provides a social experience through a friends network where you can find the key interest areas of all your friends to see what they're interested in, as well as share your interests with them.
Progress MooseNews is currently a website that has many of the planned features implemented, with some changes also having developed in the prototyping process from implementation difficulties, and user feedback. There are many personalisation and customisation opportunities that have not yet been implemented relating to the layout of the feed and the ordering of articles, especially pertaining to the friends system.
Concept Every person has their own personal tastes and areas of interest when it comes to what items of news they seek out. These interests can be very specific and difficult to find articles on. For example, if someone has a favourite director, this plugin will immediately display recent articles about their achievements and recent works without having to sift through pages of unrelated entertainment news. They simply choose their key areas of interest, and articles about these topics would be immediately displayed in their browser.
The web application is designed to act as a homepage, so it will take the main stage in a new tab page. Obviously people use web browsers for more than just news, so their commonly used services such as YouTube and Facebook will also be featured as links on the page. These services will also serve as the social connection of MooseNews, which will be discussed in the coming paragraphs.
MooseNews will also feature a mobile application that displays articles of key interest to the user. When breaking news relating to these key interests is released, an alert will be displayed on their phone; informing them to look at the app.
Both applications are designed with the intention of bringing the news that specifically interests a user, as efficiently as possible without the need for them to waste time and energy searching for it.
Friendships are usually based on mutual interests. Keeping this in mind, MooseNews allows for users to register friends and see their key interests so they can be shared between users. This way users will be able to stay informed about topics that are of particular interest to their friends and use this as a platform to have well-informed conversations or even purchase gifts that are particularly tailored to their friends’ interests.
Moose News will also be linked to social media to enhance the experience for their users. For example, Moose News can pull a user’s key interests from Facebook by looking at the pages they have ‘liked’. This will save the user time they would otherwise spend thinking through which topics to subscribe to.
Another way to integrate social media is to make it easy for users to share articles they feel are interesting. This can be done by dragging the articles from the main section of the page and dropping them onto the social media icons to the right of the page. This will facilitate convenient and simple sharing of articles on social media.
Process The team started off by brainstorming approaches to the problem space, to refine the original idea, which was submitted by Nick. It was decided that a website would be a good starting point for a prototype rather than a mobile application or a browser plugin, since the team had more of an understanding of that area of programming, and everything important to showcase was possible with just a website.
So initially Gareth made some Balsamiq mock-ups based on Nick's original design idea and conducted some user tests in order to improve on the layout of the design. After modifications were made, the rest of the group coded the design up as a website and gave it back to Gareth to test with users for functionality improvements to make the website more intuitive to use.
Throughout the rest of the semester, the cycle continued with the website slowly gaining more functionality until it was at a point the team was happy with submitting. Some of the functionality is still hard-coded to demonstrate the concept, but MooseNews is usable in it's current form.
####The Team Nick Cassidy - Team Leader and Code Nick did a lot of the hard programming and database work, leading the way through the prototyping.
Samuel Buckley - Code Sam helped Nick code & prototype the website, whilst offering much feedback and pushing for important features to be prioritised.
Gareth Seeto - Logistics and Design Gareth created the mock-ups for the prototype, and conducted numerous user feedback studies for both his mock-ups and the prototype website itself.
Zaim Rashdan - Code and Design Zaim created the logo and also contributed significantly to coding the prototype.
###Proposal Documentation ####Decision Making Process How will decisions be made? Decisions will be made with a majority vote. In the event of a tie, see the following section, as it is then considered a conflict.
Conflict Resolution
- We will stay calm and give encouragement.
- We will identify the problems among the team members.
- We will seek to understand their problems.
- We will watch out for emotional triggers among the team members.
- We will try to come out with a solution that could satisfies all team members
- We will affirm, forgive and thank to acknowledge each member for their hard work in trying to work things out
If we cannot obtain a mutual understanding to solve our conflicts as a team,
- We will inform the tutor about about our team’s situation.
- We will seek advice from the tutor.
- We will try to come out a solution with the advice given.
If continuous effort of solving the conflict within the team and seeking advice from tutor/course coordinator does not make any progress, the final decision will be made by team leader in neutral position.
Communications
The team will meet during the P02 session on Friday afternoons, with extra meetings scheduled as required. Files will be shared through Google Drive. All files names and variables will conform to the camelCase naming convention. A Facebook group has been created, to be used for general communication across the semester. A GitHub repository has also been created to share the project.
Plan The fully realised version of MooseNews would be the web browser plugin, complete with editable and shareable tags with social media integration , and the mobile application that was previously discussed. However, we have come to the conclusion that our this is an unattainable goal based on time and work constraints; so we have decided to only develop the web browser plugin with editable tags and the social media integration if time allows it.
The first task at hand is to design and conduct user testing for interface of MooseNews. This task will be undertaken during the first sprint, which will end in week eight. We already have a concept design in place and we aim to refine it through user testing during the sprint so we can accomplish our goal of presenting the user's news in the most efficient, simple, and appealing way possible. This task shall be undertaken through paper prototyping to give users an idea of the layout and interactiveness of MooseNews. The main deliverable for this task is to have a completed paper prototype that visualise the design and interactions of MooseNews.
Once we have the design and interface of MooseNews finalised, the next task is to start coding the plugin during the next sprint; finishing in week ten. The main task for this sprint is to code a web-based, wire-frame interface using HTML, CSS, and maybe JavaScript, in order to translate our intended design into a web browser interface and thus, a working form.
The final sprint following the wire-frame would to integrating the tag system and news APIs, to be completed by the final stand-up session in week 12. Since this is the core functionality of MooseNews, the most time and care is likely to be spent completing this task. The goal of this task is to ensure that the user's inputted tags is saved and is able to use the news APIs to call upon relevant news articles that match the tags.
If time permits, we will then move onto coding the social aspects of MooseNews; starting with adding friends within the application and sharing tags/articles between them. Social media integration will then be looked upon as an extension to this feature, enabling the user to share tags and articles through sites such as Facebook and gather more suggested tags and articles based upon the user's friends there.
Of course with this being a rough plan, it is likely we will deviate from the above structure in order to suit our needs and keep ahead of the time constraints.
Other Resources MooseNews will be a persistent social tool, and so it will require the use of a backend web server with a database to store accounts, friendship relations, and the key interest tags themselves. This would allow it to be used across the internet through multiple platforms.
Tags #awareness, #convenience, #homepage, #TailoredNews, #friends, #sharing, #interconnectivity