Note! All total time spent on each contribution, specified below, are approximations!
Since stuff are easily forgotten we decided to take meeting minutes during our group meetings. In each meeting minute the date, time and participants are noted down as well as stuff that all agreed on. It contains what the project should contain (the specifications), what each member in the group should do until next meeting etc. Each meeting minute took about 10 minutes to complete. A total of 6 meeting minutes were written by me. These can be found here.
Total time spent: 1 hour (excluding the time it took to write during the meetings)
As a part of the early interaction and visualization team, we sketched the first prototype of the project on papers (paper prototypes). Since we knew early that the data we were working with had a tree structure, so we went ahead and decided to that we should use a collapsible tree as the visualization tool or method. Other visualization methods we have considered during the meetings were hyperbolic tree.
As for the interaction part, it was important to not overwhelm the user with too much data in the beginning. What happens when a user click on a node? What happens when a user hover over a node? Can we use hyperbolic zoom? etc. As a first version, we wanted the graph visualization to represent the hierarchy that was already on KI's MeSH website. Only one level of parents and children should be visible.
Total time spent: 4 hours
Together with the whole group, I helped out with the presentation materials. For this task, together with the group, we followed the template that was provided to make sure that we covered everything that was needed. Some part was hard to fill in (bacause some of the terms was a bit ambigious), but I think we did pretty well.
Total time spent: 2 hours
For the demo, we needed to have a working version of our prototype. I followed the specifications we decided on during the interaction and visualization meeting. We were a bit behind our schedule so we decided to use dummy data for our prototype and some of the interaction and structure that we planned to use. In the demo you can click on the node to show the current node's (which is Pancreatic Cancer) children and hide them. It is also possible to hover over a node to read the definition of the term. The demo can be found here.
Total time spent: 3-4 hours
One of the requirement for the group project is to have a working website. I took upon the task because I had precious experience with HTML and CSS. To not spend way too much on the website design, I used the well used front-end framework Bootstrap, that also works very well with phones. For the design I went with the same colors and theme as KI's MeSH website. For this task, maintenance and detail work was included.
Total time spent: 8 hours
Because I had the responsibility over the website it would be easiest for me to make the layout and placeholders for our final version of the project. It was a bit tricky part of this part was to make text boxes and the search bar CSS work together.
Total time spent: 3 hours
We had a meeting before the final presentation to check upon our final work. We discovered some difficulities where we had double project versions. During this emergency meeting we tried to merge these versions by picking the features we liked in one of them to put in the another.
In the last minute I helped out with some of the coding where the size of the SVG didn't seem right. It had some predetermined values and it was wise to let the SVG have the same size as the browser window (minus some elements on the same page). I also made some detail changes such as the font, white outlines so the font was more clear from the visualization, made the focused node more clear etc.
Total time spent: 8 hours
Prepared my oral part for the final presentation. Which meant writing a text and practicing for the presentation.
Total time spent: 2 hours
Another requirement for the group project is to have a group and individual contribution pages where we write what each of us have contributed to the project. Again, since I have the responsibility over the website and we wanted some consistency between our pages, we decided that there should be a template where each group member can follow.
In this task, writing my individual page is also included.
Total time spent: 3 + 2 hours
Working in a group project with seven other people is hard. Because before this course we all had different previous experiences (especially when we didn't know every each person in the group) so it was hard to divide the work evenly among us.
Except for learning visualization methods and D3, a thing that I have learned from this group project is to make deadlines. Even small task as deciding on which date we have our next group meeting should have a deadline. It gives more responses from the group by doing it this way.
Another thing is to take meeting minutes. If possible, as clear as possible. As stated above, stuff are easily forgotten (I especially forgets stuff easily) and it is good to have notes to go back to check on what we have decided. Surely, these stuff aren't written in stone and stuff that we have decided on could change when we try to implement it. Maybe it wasn't so good idea. Having meeting minutes also avoided confusions and made up some of the miscommunication we had within the group.
Finally, I had a much more pleasant experience with a client as kind as KI than my previous experience in other courses. It makes the group project more worth working on!