WHOO. Second to last week completed!

Ok remember when I mentioned in Week 5 that it was one of the most productive and successful week? Well, add this week to the list. This week we were able to finalize our product for the A/B testing. Now that is a big accomplishment.

To finalize our product for testing - we really needed to get Version B up and working. Before this week, the version was unable to integrate the RTT feature we decided to add back. Luckily for us, we had Norman back on Monday so we were able to start the week with tackling this huge wall and get the RTT feature to work in Version B. After a couple of hours and a bunch of coding - we were finally able get the RTT feature integrated!! That was a huge relief. We were able to have the RTT feature in both versions.

After we were able to get that up, the team came together and discussed some of the last minute adjustments and improvements we needed to make in our versions. We decided for better user accessibility and experience to add indicators for if the user is speaking or typing, change the colors for appearance reasons, and remove the textarea of other users in the video conference window in Version B. By Tuesday, uur product was already looking and working better and ready for testing.

We conducted our first A/B test and recieved great constructive feedbacks. The feedbacks were adding a feature to expand and the textarea of the captions and RTT in Version A scrollable for caption history, names in each user’s video window to identify who is who, and for the last big one - we got feedback that in Version B, the transcript section overlaying the videos was in the way and a distraction. All of these were constructive however it required a lot more figuring and coding to do. So with the feedbacks, we went straight to work on improving our versions for the next test. We added a double click event in Version A for the textarea to expand to a specific number of rows based on the size of the video. We then added names in a div with a black box and white font in the left corner of each user’s video. Lastly, we had to figure out how to get the transcript section to pop up in a separate window instead of overlaying the videos. Getting a button to open the a new window was easy but to have the text stream live to the new window was difficult. So yup, you guessed it. Mr. Norman came to the rescue once again. It took some time and errors but in the end it was just a couple of simple codes to have the new window stream text from the div text. So yay, we were able to find a solution for all feedbacks and improve our product.

That was not the end though. The team came together and decided on adding one more feature before testing our product to 5 more participants. The feature was making the transcript downloadable after the meeting was over. Mike took charge on this so that I could go back to working on our paper. But by then, it was Friday morning and Mike wasn’t able to have it fully functionable. No worries though, I have some ideas I want to try on Monday. :)

In conclusion, this week was truly the week we made the most process and accomplished the most. We were able to finalize our product (versions), not for the public but for testing and that is huge. Because getting the download button to work, me and Mike can then focus on gathering more user feedback, writing up our paper, and creating our presentation for next week. We are almost there!!! See you guys next week ….for the last time. :(