Background Research: Inspiration

This post, I want to devote to explaining where we got our Inspiration from and talking a bit about the two applications.

The very first idea of doing an anonymous Posting-Website for students was inspired by a German App called Yodel. It is not very well known in England, but a lot of my friends from home are using it to keep track of what is happening around them. The app is following a very similar concept to our website. Smartphone users can download it and then anonymously post and others can read those posts and rate them. The user only sees the posts from people close by, for example in their city. It is mostly used by people aged 18-25 to express their thoughts and ideas without sharing their true identity.

After looking into it, me and my teammates found another app that uses the same principle. It is pretty similar to Yodel and called YikYak. So I decided to look a bit into it, hoping to learn something for our project:

YikYak was first launched in 2013 by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington. Both of them are graduates from a college in the US. The app allows people to create and view so called “Yaks” within a 10 mile radius. Just six months after the App was released, it became the 9th most downloaded app in the US.

Here you can see both, the webpage as well the app interface of YikYak:

80edd2fd-2698-4548-b32d-7a965d0ade59-620x519 Screenshot (260) Screenshot (261)


References:

YikYak, 2013. Available from: http://www.yikyakapp.com/ [Accessed: 11th March 2015]

Itunes Applestore Preview, Yik Yak LLC, Available from: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/yik-yak/id730992767?mt=8 [Accessed: 11th March 2015]

Dredge, S., 2014. The Guardian. Yik Yak is the hottest messaging app in the world. So how are Brits using it? Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/16/yik-yak-messaging-app-brits [Accessed: 11th March 2015]

New group member and taking photos

Today, Tina joined our group. She was having troubles with her own group, so she talked to Rob and he then allowed her to join ours. Since we were already pretty far into the Development of our project, there was a lot to catch her up on. Because we were all free, we arranged a group meeting and then spent some time on informing her about our work, our progress and ideas behind it. Also, we talked about the things we were still struggling with (for example the name and logo of our page) and Tina gave us some input on what we could do. After spending a lot of time thinking about the project, me and Becky knew exactly what we wanted the name to sound like and because we did not know how to clearly transform that into an actual result, we were stuck a little. Since Tina at this time had not been involved in all the planning, she had a clear mind and she gave us some input, we had not even thought about. Because we liked her ideas, we asked her if she wanted to think about the name a little more and maybe do some idea collecting on it. We all thought that might be a nice way for her to get involved in the project right away. Also, she wanted to catch up on our blog posts and I went through the code of the Home-/Posting-Page with her to explain what I did how and what still had to be done. I then updated the code on GITHUB and we added Tina to our group, so she could take part in the development of the code. Becky then showed us the Welcome-Page she put together and explained how she did it.

After we spend all this time going over code, we decided it might be a nice idea to use the rest of the day to improve the design part of our website. The girls really liked the photo I used for the Login-Page and after talking about it for a bit, we came to the conclusion that the PHP/Database part of our website was stable enough to start thinking a bit about the CSS as well. We thought it might be a nice bonding experience to go to town together to take some more photos like it and then put them together in a slideshow as the background for our Login-Page. This idea was inspired by websites like blindbarber.com or vanmoof.com (they are linked in the References at the end of this post). In the following you can see the site blindbarber.com with their slideshow:

Screenshot (258) Screenshot (259)

We thought we would only stick to photos of Bournemouth because we were creating a page for BU students and that is would be a nice touch to make this connection even clearer by focussing on Bournemouth itself. Also, we were still missing a couple of pictures for the About-Us (Welcome-Page) of ourselves. Since Israfiel did not come to the beach with us though, we decided to take those another day. Taking photos in town, we all thought about previous projects we did for our course and how for example the alphabet photo project helped us improve our photography skills and how we could use those now to improve the quality of our website’s design.


References:

Unknown, 2011. Blind Barber. Available from: http://blindbarber.com/. [Last accessed: 10th March 2015]

Unknown, unknown. Vanmoof. Available from: http://vanmoof.com/ . [Last accessed: 10th March 2015]