GSoC/2016/StatusReports/Nanduni
About Me
Name : Nanduni Indeewaree Nimalsiri
From : Sri Lanka
Email : [email protected]
KDE user name : nandunin
Freenode IRC Nick : Nanduni
Project Overview
Project Name
Improve categorization and search on Inqlude web site
Brief description
Inqlude is an open, crowd sourced archive of Qt libraries which helps developers to find, install and use Qt libraries easily. A public version of Inqlude runs at http://inqlude.org/. The current website has few options to search libraries under several categories. Hence this requires more use cases tailored to the data collected on Inqlude. The intended project task is to improve categorization and search on Inqlude website in order to offer a better user experience.
Description in detail
The project mainly targeted on developing a complete UX/UI and functionality overhaul for the website by redesigning the interfaces to provide a better display of library metadata and developing new functionalities to sort libraries under different topics. This was more kind of a design oriented project and we followed an approach called `product design sprint` which was a 6-phase exercise that uses design thinking to reduce the inherent risks in successfully bringing the website to the production. The objective of following this kind of an approach was to find solutions that offer a better user experience to the Qt audience.
The major part of the project lied in design thinking. The goal of the design phase was to derive designs to the website by analysing data based on user feedback. Design solutions had been derived by considering user feedback. As part of implementing the design process, I had to go through the different stages of the creation of user interface from need finding, over quick prototyping, to designing, implementing and testing of the user interfaces. This had lots of interesting and challenging tasks like recording observations from the actual audience, carrying out usability tests, gathering inspiration from similar tools, incremental sketching, storyboarding, heuristic evaluation, prototyping and then finally implementing the proposed solution. Most of the limitations and shortcomings of the website are addressed in the new design.
After completing each phase, I updated the wiki page of my project at GitHub project repository. This wiki is a central landing page where I documented how I approached the project and referenced other pages and tools I used.
As side tasks, testing, contributing to the metadata at inqlude-data and improving the inqlude command client tool had been carried out.
Work report
Repositories
My works is merged to the following master repositories.
Documents
Blog (Contains all the posts that I wrote from the project proposal period until the pencils down)
Resources
Inqlude project on KDE's Phabricator
Design activities
Future improvements
- In future, the website needs more improvements in improving the search results.
- Inqlude metadata needs improvements in terms of acurate content and updating.
Apart from these, there is a set of issues listed at https://github.com/cornelius/inqlude/issues that needs to be fixed.