Spring quarter blog post 3

As a team, we are in the process of wrapping up a few projects and brainstorming ideas to start another set of projects before the end of the quarter. Mark is taking the lead on adding features to customize new supply chains in the future and also to edit the already existing ones. This will enable the user to create a web application tailored to their needs simply by filling out fields in a form. This week he worked on the framework for the user interface and shared his ideas with us. We discussed the layout of this part of the app and how each step is going to be organized so that it is intuitive for the user. We looked at different examples such as google forms and canvas to inform our designs. Mark drew some mockups of each page on the form and walked us through it, and we gave him feedback about what can be improved. Senem and Maria finished the design of FCCI form for the app. They were having some issues with compatibility with the codebase when trying to add their changes, so they worked together with Austin and Mark to solve this problem. We first thought of concepts such as type intersection/union, but then Austin came up with the idea of using generic functions to intake arguments with arbitrary types. This was an important shift in our implementation. There are still a few issues with this implementation that we can hope we can solve later this week. Senem and Maria also added features such as units and error messages to the textfield, so that the units appear (eg, kg next to the weight of a unit), and the textfield does not accept any input besides numbers. However, Senem and Maria are waiting to solve the compilation errors to be able to test these added features. In terms of next projects, Austin is going to be working on adapting the app to mobile phones so that Zorzal workers can put information into the database without needing to go back and forth from the computer. Austin is also working on allowing users to add pictures to the forms that we will then store in the database. Senem and Maria are also in the process of pinpointing their individual projects. Some options are converting the program into Spanish and/or having multiple language options, working on the customization of the forms specifically, working on the design of the mobile phone version of the app, or working on the back-end to figure out better ways to store information in sheets documents. No matter which path we end up taking, we are very excited about what this quarter will bring to our project!

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Above is a mock-up of the pages for supply chain customization. 

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