Concept presentation

Last week, we presented our concept to both our client on Monday, and our classmates on Thursday. What was really positive was that our contact person from the ministry of environment seemed to be very pleased with our presentation. The only major thing he wanted to change was moving from an area based thinking into location based thinking. This means, that we wouldn't give the user the chance to rate a certain city, like Helsinki, or a part of the city, like Arabia in Helsinki, but instead we should just ask him to rate his current location within a 1 km range.

This proved to be really problematic to change by our thursday's presentation, and resulted in some critique about the user friendliness of the app. I perfectly understand this critique, since we were struggling with this problem quite a bit, and it was good to hear that others had similar thoughts to ours. I was a little disappointed though that we didn't receive that much of constructive criticism, or ideas on how this could work better, but we were only told that this doesn't quite work. Which we already knew. This is also our fault, since we failed to send the presentation to our opponents in time, which was partly due to lack of information, and partly due to the changes we still had to make after discussing with the client on Monday.

So what we will have to do, is to really think about this location vs. area thing, and hopefully talk to a person with more experience on GIS systems. What makes this problem really tricky is that whichever solution we decide to go with, it should be applied consistently throughout the app, so both in the review tool, and in the results tool.

Overall, the presentation to our class gave some valuable ideas on what we will have to develop further, but I have to say that most comments were about the exactly same things we already had considered, over and over, and didn't help us get any closer to a solution. At this point, perhaps we would have needed a more in depth discussion with someone who has experience from building an app like this. The suggestion to discuss with the research group responsible for creating the urban mediator app was really helpful, and we might also contact the GIS department in Otaniemi. I met one of their professors Paula Ahonen-Rainio a few weeks ago when she was giving a guest lecture on cartography at our school, and she seemed really interested in helping us find the GIS knowledge we need to further develop this app. There apparently is a whole master's degree program dedicated to GIS systems in Otaniemi, so perhaps we could find someone from there to help us in the app development during spring, if needed. We currently have no info on the spring's course, so it's hard to plan that far ahead yet.

We will meet with the client again tomorrow. We will go through the same questions we presented in our presentation, and hopefully agree that the next step is to consult people with more expertise on our subject.