My Solar You app was the first Android app I have ever built. Partly due to this fact, while fully functional, the app is not particularly user friendly, and could be greatly improved upon. Regardless, I learned a lot during the course of this project. A large part of the frustration was attempting to implement my on-paper design but not knowing how. With that said...
Design
My app consists of two main elements. The first is Age and Weight, displayed on the top and bottom to convey input and output respectively. The second is the planet selection, implemented via two horizontal scroll views of buttons. Each button contains an image of a planet in our solar system. Again, the top and bottom rows are for input and output.
Functionality
Brief:
- The user enters an age, a weight, or both into the top field(s)
- An origin planet is selected from the first scroll view
- A resulting planet is selected from the second scroll view, resulting in an output displayed in the bottom field(s)
Detailed:
To use the app, a user simply enters his or her information at the top. Age and weight can be entered individually, or together. If the user has supplied neither age nor weight, the app will not produce an output and will use a Toast notification to prompt the user to enter at least one field. With at least one field entered, tapping a planet in the first row selects the origin planet. When a planet's button is tapped, a Toast notification appears with the name of that planet. If the user taps a planet in the second row before the first, a Toast notification will tell them to choose an origin planet first. When the user has selected both an origin planet and a resulting planet, the app returns the age and/or weight conversions into the fields at the bottom.
If only one origin field is entered, only its corresponding result field is displayed (the other field remains blank). A previous bug was that after a calculation, clicking a planet in the second row would produce the calculation result for the originally clicked origin planet, and the newly clicked resulting planet. This was fixed such that any calculation requires a new selection of both origin and resulting planets.
This design could be improved in many ways. The easiest thing to improve on would be to clearly indicate that the top row is for origin planets, and the bottom row is for resulting planets. Additionally, a user may not be familiar with the order of the planets or the way they look. If that is the case, this app may cause the user to tap random planets until they select the one they wanted. Even if a user knew these things, it requires additional cognitive load to comprehend and hit the right button. An improvement to this design could easily include the names of the planets along with the buttons. On a broader, more functional level, this app only lets you view one conversion from an origin planet to a single resulting planet. If, say, a user wanted to go from Earth to Jupiter and then Earth to Mars, they would have to tap on multiple buttons. A great improvement to this design would be to display all planets, and simply require an age and weight input. When these values are provided, the app would calculate the results for each planet, and display them all at once on the same screen.
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