Changes
Removed Sports
In our user tests we found that sports stories relevant enough to be posted on ESPN are not bound to a local context. Some users felt uncomfortable bringing up sports or being asked about sports because they felt like they were being 'quizzed' by the other person. Sports tend to be a high risk topic to introduce because the conversation tends to cease if one user does not know anything about the specific sport. All of these factors lead us to drop the ESPN feed on the side.
Changed the content of local news section
In our initial prototype we were displaying news headlines from specified cities. NY Times headlines ended up being to vague to spark much conversation about local news. We opted to use the NY Times snippet object which provides a short summary of each article. Using snippets meant that we had to cut down the number of news stories displayed.
Made it more clear where the context is from
Through user testing we found that users were initially unclear if they were viewing context from their location or their chat partner's. We changed our application to explicitly state the location of the chat partner. For example instead of just "local news" for a chat partner in New York, the app now says "Local news in New York."
In our user tests we found that sports stories relevant enough to be posted on ESPN are not bound to a local context. Some users felt uncomfortable bringing up sports or being asked about sports because they felt like they were being 'quizzed' by the other person. Sports tend to be a high risk topic to introduce because the conversation tends to cease if one user does not know anything about the specific sport. All of these factors lead us to drop the ESPN feed on the side.
Changed the content of local news section
In our initial prototype we were displaying news headlines from specified cities. NY Times headlines ended up being to vague to spark much conversation about local news. We opted to use the NY Times snippet object which provides a short summary of each article. Using snippets meant that we had to cut down the number of news stories displayed.
Made it more clear where the context is from
Through user testing we found that users were initially unclear if they were viewing context from their location or their chat partner's. We changed our application to explicitly state the location of the chat partner. For example instead of just "local news" for a chat partner in New York, the app now says "Local news in New York."
New Features
Added background weather image from flickr
In user testing we observed that too much text was distracting in some video chat situations. We used the flickr API to get the current weather of a chat partner and search for an image in their city in the current weather. For example if I was chatting with someone in New York and it was snowing, the background image of my chat window would be a photo of New York in the snow.
Developed full geo-Location Functionality
In our initial prototype we had hard coded in a specific location for each user's context to display. We used firebase to fully implement sharing both a username and location between users.
Added trending hashtags from the closest area
We used to Twitter API to retrieve the closest trending hashtags to each user.
Built a sign in screen
We added a simple sign in screen to allow users to choose their location and screen name. This allows us now to display the user's name to their chat partner.
In user testing we observed that too much text was distracting in some video chat situations. We used the flickr API to get the current weather of a chat partner and search for an image in their city in the current weather. For example if I was chatting with someone in New York and it was snowing, the background image of my chat window would be a photo of New York in the snow.
Developed full geo-Location Functionality
In our initial prototype we had hard coded in a specific location for each user's context to display. We used firebase to fully implement sharing both a username and location between users.
Added trending hashtags from the closest area
We used to Twitter API to retrieve the closest trending hashtags to each user.
Built a sign in screen
We added a simple sign in screen to allow users to choose their location and screen name. This allows us now to display the user's name to their chat partner.
Implementation Progress
Our final implementation steps will depend heavily on the feedback we receive after submitting this iteration.