The time has come to choose this semester’s project for DPS909. I’ve always had a passing interest in user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design so I was pleased to see that some of the projects involved working on UI. One project that stood out in particular has to do with improving Webmaker for mobile/tablets. Back when I was working on the Popcorn project, a colleague and I actually got Popcorn working on an iPad as part of a skunkworks project. I loaded up Webmaker on my iPad 1 to see how it ran and found that although the page loaded and rendered correctly, none of the tiles were clickable. This is likely because the tiles respond to a hover event that can’t be replicated on a mobile device. Popcorn Maker also loaded and rendered correctly, but I was unable to load a YouTube video for remixing. Thimble was the finickiest of the lot, failing to bring up an onscreen keyboard when tapping in the editor. I was able to bring up the keyboard in a roundabout way, by tapping an HTML element and then tapping the orange “?” that appeared. It’s clear that none of these websites have been optimized much less designed with a mobile interface in mind, so there is a lot to be done in that regard. There weren’t any specific bugs for this project so I’ll have to see just how much they want to improve. Another interesting project is one to improve the Thimble UI. I looked at the listed bugs and they seemed manageable compared to some of the other projects’.
Hopefully I’ll get to work on one of these projects!