Relevance
As a Frontend Developer for Guidify, I play a crucial role in shaping the user interface (UI) and overall user experience (UX) of the app. Since the frontend is what users interact with directly, my work is essential for the app's success.
My responsibilities in developing Guidify include:
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Designing and implementing an intuitive and visually appealing user interface, enabling users to easily navigate the app, access audio guides, create playlists, and interact with other features.
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Ensuring that the app is responsive and optimized for various devices, screen sizes, and resolutions. This provides a seamless experience for users across different Android smartphones and tablets.
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Integrating third-party APIs, such as Google Maps and Google Places, to offer real-time navigation, location data, and other related functionalities within the app.
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Collaborating with the backend development team to ensure proper communication between the frontend and backend systems, allowing for smooth data exchange and efficient app performance.
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Continuously testing and refining the app's frontend to identify and address any bugs, performance issues, or usability concerns, ultimately enhancing the overall user experience.
In summary, my work as a Frontend Developer is vital to the success of Guidify. I create the app's visual appearance and usability, which directly impacts user satisfaction and engagement. My efforts enable users to enjoy a seamless and immersive audio-guided travel experience through the app.
Technical Challenges
Separating Work: It will be difficult to separate the work so Rodions, Mahaveer and I don't work on the same thing because then it will create merge conflicts in GitHub. Also we have to clearly communicate what we're planning to work on so we don't waste time doing the same task as someone else. We have had few cases of where people say they will work on an aspect of the front end that I am responsible for.
User Feedback: It will be difficult to get continuous honest user feedback through the development of this app as it is difficult for people to usually "harshly" review something and will usually opt to focus only on the positives rather than something that we should fix or change. We will also most likely get conflicting feedback and it will be hard to know which feedback we should prioratise
Feature worked on
Throughout the lifecycle of Guidify these are the features that I worked on and created.
Bottom Info Card
Login Page functionality
Assist with UI Re-design of Bottom Info Card
Media Player
Design Search Page
Technology Used
During the development of Guidify's User Interface, I employed various cutting-edge technologies, including Android Studio and Visual Studio Code. These advanced IDEs enabled me to harness the full potential of React-Native as our chosen language framework for the app development. This combination of tools and frameworks facilitated a streamlined and efficient development process, ultimately resulting in a high-quality and user-friendly application.
React-Native is the chosen development framework for creating the Guidify mobile app. By leveraging JavaScript and React, React-Native enables the team to build a cross-platform app that runs smoothly on both Android and iOS devices, ensuring a consistent and high-quality user experience for all Guidify users.
We hope to bring Guidify further by expanding into iOS and applying for a Google Play store position in the future.
- Previous experience working with React (a similar framework for web development)
- Community driven development allowing us to use public libraries
- Most popular framework for developing phone applications
- No cost or sign up to use
Android Studio is the primary Integrated Development Environment (IDE) utilized for developing the Guidify app on Android devices. It offers specialized tools and features tailored for Android app development, streamlining the process and enhancing productivity in building Guidify's mobile experience.
- Build and compile our code into android code
- Launch emulators
- Install tools and frameworks used for launching application onto phone
Visual Studio Code serves as an alternative Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for working on the Guidify app. It supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, including React-Native, which helps the development team efficiently code, debug, and manage version control for Guidify.
npm, short for Node Package Manager, is a package manager for JavaScript, and I used it for developing Guidify for several reasons:
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Simplify dependency management: Using npm allowed me to easily manage third-party libraries and packages required for the development of Guidify. It helped streamline the process of installing, updating, or removing dependencies in our project with just a few commands.
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Access to a vast ecosystem: npm provided access to a vast ecosystem of open-source packages, enabling me to leverage pre-built solutions for various functionalities. This helped speed up the development process and reduced the amount of custom code needed for Guidify.