Modifying Expectations.

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Hey there! it's been a while.

Random fact: I used to be a very indecisive person. Until I met a friend who was obsessed with planning everything and setting goals.

What has helped me achieve productivity lately is writing out a goal, listing steps to achieving the goal, mapping out a plan and setting deadlines.

Prior to this post, I published a couple of articles in this series where I talked about getting accepted by Outreachy to start an internship with the ODK-X Community and all of my experiences.

While submitting a final application to Outreachy, applicants were required to come up with a project timeline. The project timeline was meant to serve as a guide for tasks an intern would complete weekly, if accepted.

You know I got accepted right? Lol. (Does my happy dance).

Project Progress

I am halfway through my internship and I can't believe we are in the sixth week already.

I'm really glad interns were required to come up with a project plan and I've followed mine religiously.

In the past weeks, my mentors and I would go through my project timeline to ensure work done so far is in line with the project goals. I wrote extensively in the Week 5 blog post about my progress so far but here's a recap;

• I conducted a mini research with few users, synthesised the data I got with the previous research that had been conducted and created a research Summary document.

• I reviewed the ODK-X Survey and Tables mobile apps for user experience issues. I took a screenshot of all screens I interacted with and came up with designs that conformed with the design guidelines and improved the experience.

• I'm designing new UI elements; like navigation menu, buttons, adding icons and font etc.

• I'm currently struggling with implementing some designed components in the codebase.

Any Updates?

Well, yea!!! During our community group call for this week, I was assigned a task to extend the redesign of the menu top app bar to the ODK-X Survey and Tables app. As that was a priority for the next app release.

This didn't change the timeline so much but most times some task take longer than expected.

I have had a few challenges with setting up my codebase and building the Survey and Tables app project in Android Studio. The Gradle build fails each time I try to build the project.

But I think I finally found a fix to the Gradle issue I have faced for some weeks now. I found some answers on Stackoverflow, my mentors assisted with a few resources and pointed me to some part of the documentation.

Everytime I read the ODK-X docs, it feels like I discover something new which I missed initially. Lol

For example, I have also been trying to install and conduct a UX Audit on the ODK-X Tables app. I finally downloaded and installed the app.

I interacted with it and came up with design suggestions that could uplift the interface.

I spent days reading the documentation on how to successfully install and run the ODK-X Tables app.

Somehow, I missed the part that talked about most of the screens being customized by our users. This is because the Tables and Survey app allows users to create forms and tables and render a fully customized user interface in order to collect, manage, and visualize their data on an Android device.

What next?

Before that, I didn't mention that I've been getting positive feedback from my mentors on the work done so far.

This has made me really excited.

In the coming weeks, I would be updating the existing ODK-X style guide with the components I created, conducting usability test on designs, implementing the designs in the codebase and general review from my mentors.

So far,

I'm glad to be a part of this project. The first half of the internship has been a great learning experience for me. I can't wait to share my progress for the next few weeks with you.

See you soon!

Cheers.