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- 1. User
- Our project consists in changing the whole experience of travelling to other countries, a
- different way to get to know different cultures and places, which means the user is a keyfactor to
- the development of the final product.
- We proceeded to a direct study with possible users of our application, this way we could gather
- all information about what are the needs of users and what they expect from a plataform like the
- one we are developing. We started by making a little quiz on the matter to which 21 people
- answered. On the question "You think there's a lack of connection between foreign
- students/travellers and the local people in your hometown?" 80% answered yes, this making us focus
- on ways to improve the communication between travelers and locals through our application, we came
- up with solutions as an interactive local events feed with comments and an "Ask Arround" feed,
- with recent questions and answers made by locals and travelers arround the user on different
- categorized topics. *grafic here*
- All the other statistics we gathered all joined to the same conclusion we had previously on how to
- approach the problem and its solutions, that being a real time interaction with travelers and
- locals near the user, giving each user the option to ask and receive a real time answer from a
- local or looking for other users answers to previous questions on various topics, also knowing the
- location of other users near you which might lead to a more direct interaction hopefully leading
- to diffrent social experiences and culture sharing. From the view of a traveller user the visiting
- the visiting of certain cultural/historical areas is very important, so a task this plataform will
- have to perform will have to be to provide a maped guidence (through GPS) to certain interest
- points recommended by other users.
- Based on all the information gathered we developed a low fidelity prototype in flash (actionscript
- 2.0) to decide how would all the tasks that the application would have to perform be executed, in
- a intuitive, fast and simple way.
- With the low-fidelity prototype in flash we came to the conclusion that one main button to access
- all main tasks of the product should be accessible from every different current "page" that the
- user is viewing would make all the interaction between the user and the software faster and
- simpler.
- After some experimenting we decided the base structure of how the application would have to be
- "organized", so that an user that is using it for the first time can discover how to perform any
- task wanted within very few clicks, that way the user will be able to access all information that
- our project plans to provide, in each respective task, in the fastest way possible, without the
- user being confused with the way it has to interact with the application.
- 2. Technology
- For the past three years android smartphones have been the most used worldwide, since our project
- goal is to be an effecient quick way to access information about a location while travelling,
- going for a mobile application is the best option and being android the most popular we opted to
- develop it for that specific OS.
- This android application will be available in all android versions, since it has low requirements.
- We used flash and actionscript 2.0 to create a simple prototype test with the users. The simple
- prototype wasn't connected to any database or even had any animations, it was only some frames
- with a navigatable possible user interface for our project.
- To develop the application we'll use:
- -Eclipse + ADT plugin;
- -Android SDK Tools;
- -Android Platform-tools;
- (from the standard android development kit)
- (https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html?hl=i)
- -Facebook login android system
- (from facebook developers)
- To store all the data we opted to implement a MySQL with all the needed tables to store user
- information and info feeds (ex:Events,Ask Arround). We opted to use MySQL because is easy to use,
- free, secure and fast.
- In the "Find Travelers" and "Find Locals" lists we'll need to have a filter to prioritize the
- information shown, for that a simple algorithm will be implemented in the code that loads the
- database, which will then load first locals/travelers with common language as the user, then the
- ones closer and after the ones with common interests.
- The application will require a global positioning system on the phone so it'll be able to
- calculate which are the nearest "locals" or "travelers" arround the user.
- To the implementation of that map we'll use standard google API for android development with a
- simple algorithm that calculates the distance of users.
- (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location/index.html)
- 3. Goals
- With the analysis the study of the user and the research on the tecnologie to use we defined our
- goals with this project.
- Our main goal is to build an intuitive and easy to use mobile application that'll allow travelers
- to get to know a new location with a constant interaction with locals, that will allow foreigns to
- discover and view any place in the world from the locals point of view, per exemple get to know
- the best way to use public transports or the best/cheapest restaurants. Since our target "public"
- for this plataform will be very wide (tourists, erasmus students, emigrants), the application will
- have to be very simple, and every task that it can perform will be at a little "click distance"
- from any point of the plataform. To make the log in an easy task, is also one of the goals we set,
- so that the user can be in using the application as soon as possible from the moment it is
- installed. Fast real time information obtained directly through other users is also one of our
- aims with this project. Our project also intends to provide a guide to various points of interest
- (museums, monuments, culturaral areas, etc..) to a visiting foreign, that information being
- provided in real time on a map through a geolocation system being also information given by locals
- or previous travellers, since every user will be able to "pin" on the map points of interest.
- One of the most important objectives we have is the safety of our software, since our project will
- require a lot of user information storage it is very important that that information remains safe
- and that the users can trust in our system. The software also has to be as effecient as possible
- and also fast without requiring too much of the phone hardware, so it can run in older devices
- without any problems. In this same matter regarding security and privacy, we'll give user's the
- choice of which information they want to add to our databases.
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