Fifth client meeting reactions

Yesterday, we met with professor Ackley in our fifth client meeting. We kept in mind the last time we tried to show a demo to Ackley (third client meeting), when we were not able to show the model properly because of a clear lack of preparation. Fortunately, we learnt from our mistakes and the past week we showed a decent demo to Nikan. As Ackley had not seen any proper demo, it was our chance to demonstrate that we had already most of functionality working.

As usual, we started the meeting with the last week task report. No problems in this sense, because all the members of the team were able to complete their tasks due to before the client meeting. Then, we spent almost all the rest of the meeting showing the demo. Last time, we used my laptop to present our demo. It actually worked fine, but since I am running Rails on an Ubuntu installation inside a Virtual Machine (VirtualBox), the screen resolution features are not as good as in a regular installation. This caused some minor visualization issues when we ran the demo using Firefox browser. Therefore, this time we decided to use Natalie's Macbook laptop in order to avoid this kind of problems that could worsen the user's experience.

Again, the Demigod's demo was really good because we were able to show all the functionality that were working properly so far. As we were working most of the time focused on the functionality rather than on the design, the demo looked not as pretty as we liked, but the main goal right now is that the application works fine, and then, we will address the style and design stuff.

Even though we did a great job showing the demo, Ackley made some comments about our application, such as:

- The Index page may include a kind of animated carousel.
- Profile page: show the user’s name instead of the email. Include the username and a logout button on the right side of the navigation bar, as usual on this kind of websites.
- A small picture of each challenge may be added. Also applied for the different categories of challenges.
- He suggested using always the same name to define a "Check-in", instead of things like “Success”.
- Fail button should include a confirmation dialog (“Are you sure?”)
- What the points really mean? Points distribution: Can you distribute the points in different dimensions?
- Statistics and challenges page need better design...
- On the way encouragement when you log in (motivation quotes or something similar)
- Decide the final list of challenges.
- Was the maximum number of check-ins per week (7) our choice?
- He also suggest starting to think about the final demo of our project.

However, it seems Ackley liked our demo, and he said that his less concern about our project so far is about the functionality. This sounded like "Ok guys, let's focus on the design", but we still have to deal with some functionality features. Anyway, we are going to start working on the design the next week.