Good evening and welcome back again everyone who is following along! This has been a bit of a wild week for myself and the team working over Faulkner Footsteps! Last Thursday we went to the First Community Bank and presented our app and all of the recent developments to it, to the Faulkner County Historical Society! It was very exciting and rewarding to meet and talk with so many people both engaged with the app and as excited as us at all the new features that it can provide not only to the Historical Society but to Faulkner County as a whole!

But, all is not completely said and done with this app, as we are continuing our expedition to fully polish and complete the app as soon as possible. We are hearing a lot of great feedback from our beta testers and it is allowing us to pile up the remaining errors, bugs, and polishing that we need to focus the rest of our time towards this semester! So for this week I worked on one of our long standing features: The Achievements page. Currently and for a while now, the achievements page has been predominately where the app is able to track the user’s achievements and grant the user achievements just by tapping them.

And well, frankly that is silly. So I worked on redesigning the achievements page and instead granting the user the ability to tap on the achievement and read about what they need to do to get it. I assume this could be easily broadened with developing new achievements which the user could see their progress on a bar somewhere on the profile, where they see all of their earned achievements. For this week I worked on removing the tap-to-grant achievement mechanism and instead just made a pop-up to tell the user what to do and how to find out where the location is that they want to earn the achievement for. Of course these buttons and the square are the same theme, color scheme, and design as all of the others for the rest of the app to keep with the cohesion that we worked so hard to build.

I look forward to talking with my team on this design implementation, as there were more than a few kinks to sort out with the app when I attempted to outright remove the achievements page. So I hope that we can find a new use that we can utilize and continue to help make the app feel as great as possible, that might could help extend the life of the app and grant users even more reason to want to utilize it out on their adventures!

Well everyone, that is it for this week, and I look forward to talking with you again soon and letting you know how wrapping things up works for the app. It has truly been a wonderful adventure and I can’t wait to see the fully polished and perfect app at the end of it all. Thanks again and stay tuned!