The Team:
Alexis Covington, Nikhil Nayak, Kurt Spencer, Abhinav Srinivasan, Neha Vinod Ahir
Core Problem:
We wanted to create a mobile application that allows users
to find places of interest, group them together in buckets, rate the places
they've visited and share this information with friends. Our application lets
users create buckets, find places using google maps, and add them to buckets.
Application features:
Sign in through Google+: A user can sign in to the
application using a Google+ account. This avoids the overhead of creating a new
account with new credentials.
Creating a bucket: A
user can create different types of buckets through the application. The
application provides various options for bucket styles.
Exploring the map to add places to the bucket list: The user
can explore a map, find a place of interest and add it to any of the buckets.
Rating and reviewing a place: Once a user visits any of the
places, he can rate the places and add reviews about it.
Sharing a Bucket: The application also allows a user to
share buckets through Google+. The buckets can either be shared publicly or
with specific users. Buckets can be shared with or without pictures.
Top Bucket Listing: The app provides a list of top rated
places based on ratings given by the user for visited places.
Application technology stack:
We have developed this application to work on the android
operating system.
Google+:
Google maps API:
SQLite:
User Evaluation Results:
The positives:
- The home screen and UI is well designed which big icons that pictorially describe actions well.
- When places added to bucket, the icon changing to show the bucket is a good feature.
- Places can be added with multiple ways: Long click as well as search. This makes it flexible and easy to add places to the map.
The negatives:
- App icon should be changed as it doesn’t stand out
- Share Buckets button on home page is misleading since you actually need to go into a bucket to share it with our current implementation
- Difficult to figure out that long click is how you add a place to a bucket without a tutorial
- Place information page has a lot of free space when viewed on tablet (needs improvement)
Future Work:
- The application currently needs the user to input the entire
word for searching. An important utility
could be to add an auto-complete feature for search.
- The application supports Google+ login. One of the future
works could be to integrate Facebook login as well.
- Sharing of buckets, in the future, could be done directly
through the app instead of using Google+, which is the current technique.
- One of the future items is integrating the Places API for
information about places on the map, so that more information can be displayed.
- The bucket icons can be customized to the choice of the
user.
- The overall look and feel of the user interface can be
improved upon as a future work item.
- The places of pictures can be added to the place information
page.
Alexis Covington, Nikhil Nayak, Kurt Spencer, Abhinav Srinivasan, Neha Vinod Ahir
Core Problem:
We wanted to create a mobile application that allows users to find places of interest, group them together in buckets, rate the places they've visited and share this information with friends. Our application lets users create buckets, find places using google maps, and add them to buckets.
The positives:
- The home screen and UI is well designed which big icons that pictorially describe actions well.
- When places added to bucket, the icon changing to show the bucket is a good feature.
- Places can be added with multiple ways: Long click as well as search. This makes it flexible and easy to add places to the map.
The negatives:
- App icon should be changed as it doesn’t stand out
- Share Buckets button on home page is misleading since you actually need to go into a bucket to share it with our current implementation
- Difficult to figure out that long click is how you add a place to a bucket without a tutorial
- Place information page has a lot of free space when viewed on tablet (needs improvement)