Elizabeth Hadik-Barkoczy

Overview

DaySlayer,™ my Techtonica bootcamp capstone project, is a web-based application that helps the Daily Team Leaders to lead effortlessly with its powerful features.

The program has been designed and adapted for members of Techtonica’s cohorts, but it is easily adaptable for other curricula. It received the greatest praise from each cohort and staff member, and is currently being prepared for Techtonica staff adoption.

View DaySlayer™ Live View DaySlayer™ GitHub Repo

The Problem Being Solved

The goal of DaySlayer™ was to solve the biggest problem with being a team’s Day Lead: struggling with assembling the vast amount of information from disparate sources and tools to lead the team. The information resided in a half-dozen places, which needed to be parsed and then assembled into one place.

The result was that every day, Team Leads would be scrambling to gather all this information, adding to the already demanding job of being the day leader. This issue is resolved by my application, which automates the process of compiling all necessary data in one location. As a result, instead of performing the “daily quarterback scramble,” the Team Lead may begin the day in tranquility and concentrate on leading the team, instead.

The Engineered Solution

My application was built on offering a tool to make team leadership simple, facilitating the day’s Team Lead to focus on empowering the team for peak performance. Built on the PERN stack, the application is a software program that works as an interactive, yet guided, leadership tool.

Guiding the user through the steps necessary to provide all the information needed to lead the team for the day, the application’s Dashboard automatically:

uses the Google API to pull from various Google Calendars the team is subscribed to and consolidates it into one place.
uses APIs to generate the motivational quotes and meditation guides needed for the day
generates member pairings
and finally, copy and paste all of the information formatted perfectly to be inserted into the team messaging service of choice.

Inside the Guide section, users are given step-by-step instructions on how to lead the various scheduled meetings, which the user can check off once it is completed. Links are provided to various documents needed for each meeting, which is a huge time saver for the Team Lead. No more searching over and over again for the same documents and links!

Technologies Used

Postgresql Database
Express
Reach.js
Node.js
ES Lint
JEST
React Testing Libraries
Docker
Auth0 API
Quotes REST API

User Modeling

Understanding and designing the demands of the end-user is the first step in successfully developing a meaningful and useful solution. Personas help us keep focus on the people who will actually use the product.

Persona decisions were created in collaboration with the cohort team members. There are 2 main groups of users that are being targeted in this application:

Administrators

Users who are setting up the initial cohort memberships. Because Single Sign On with Google accounts is used, set-up is a streamlined process that can be accomplished in minutes.

Team Members

Each of the team members represent the end user in a unique way. Based on that data and because I use an iterative approach to engineering, I needed to adjust the application and the user experience along the way.

User Flow

User flow is a result of listing all possible actions that needs to be thoroughly considered, as well as the system behavior in each scenario. It gives me the overview of the activities each user is able to perform.

The user flows and the task that the team members would complete were based on Techtonica’s curricula and their resources.

Final Product

I closely worked with the cohort team members and curriculum admins to understand the end users before I began to develop the application in order to deliver a superb user experience that is straightforward and ideal for everyone.

The Results

The results gathered from the usability testing were better than expected. User satisfaction was very high — they were really happy with how simple and easy it was to utilize the tool to plan their day.

Although the effectiveness result was excellent, I still believe there is potential for improvement. For example, being able to make the step function non-linear so that a user can enter a multi-step flow at any point of the flow. A management panel to control automated features would also be desirable.

Overall, the efficiency was the biggest success. The effort that users needed to put in to create the Day Lead tasks was significantly less than what would be required without DaySlayer™. This was made feasible by offering a user experience that truly satisfies the demands of the users, turning DaySlayer™ into a valuable tool that attained the targeted goals.

DaySlayerTM