Decide on a overall project direction (user profile, problem addressed, societal impact, optimize or morph?).
It is not too early to set an overall direction for your project.
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Set up a weekly project meeting time/venue with your team members
We recommend at least one face-to-face project meeting per week. The project meeting time can be used to discuss project related things, but also, can be used as a time for team members to work on the project tasks individually (having all members in the same place will facilitate easier collaboration and more peer-learning).
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Play around with AB4
Download the latest released version (i.e., the jar file) of AB4 from its upstream repo and play around with it to familiarize with its current features.
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Decide project direction, target user profile, and problem addressed
Use your first project meeting to discuss with your team members and decide your project direction, target user profile, and the value proposition of the product, as described in
[Admin Project Scope]
In general, each team is expected to take one of these two directions:
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[Direction 1] Optimize AddressBook for a more specific target user group:
An AddressBook,
- for users in a specific profession e.g. doctors, salesmen, teachers, etc.
- based on the nature/scale of contacts e.g. huge number of contacts (for HR admins, user group admins), mostly incomplete contacts, highly volatile contact details, contacts become inactive after a specific period (e.g. contract employees)
- based on what users do with the contacts e.g. organize group events, share info, do business, do analytics
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[Direction 2] Morph AddressBook into a different product: Given that AddressBook is a generic app that manages a type of elements (i.e. contacts), you can use it as a starting point to create an app that manages something else.
This is a high-risk high-reward option because morphing requires extra work but a morphed product may earn more marks than an optimized product of similar complexity.An app to manage,
- Bookmarks of websites
- Tasks/Schedule
- Location info
- Thing to memorize i.e. flash cards, trivia
- Forum posts, news feeds, Social media feeds
- Online projects or issue trackers that the user is interested in
- Emails, possibly from different accounts
- Multiple types of related things e.g. Contacts and Tasks (if Tasks are allocated to Contacts)
For either direction, you need to define a target user profile and a value proposition:
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Target user profile: Define a very specific target user profile.
💡 We require you to narrow down the target user profile as opposed to trying to make it as general as possible. Here is an example direction of narrowing down target user: anybody → teachers → university teachers → tech savvy university teachers → CS2113/T instructors.
Be careful not to contradict given project constraints when defining the user profile e.g. the target user should still prefer typing over mouse actions.
It is expected that your product will be optimized for the chosen target users i.e., add features that are especially/only applicable for target users (to make the app especially attractive to them). w.r.t. the example above, there can be features that are applicable to CS2113/T instructors only, such as the ability to navigate to a student's project on GitHub
💡 Your project will be graded based on how well the features match the target user profile and how well the features fit-together.- It is an opportunity to exercise your product design skills because optimizing the product to a very specific target user requires good product design skills.
- It minimizes the overlap between features of different teams which can cause plagiarism issues. Furthermore, higher the number of other teams having the same features, less impressive your work becomes especially if others have done a better job of implementing that feature.
- Value proposition: Define a clear value proposition (what problem does the product solve? how does it make the the user's life easier?) that matches the target user profile.