Screenshot of the web pages aimed for mobile use
Hi all,
I have to do a group project for school. I’ve come up with this design for the pages. At first I thought of going for this idea ’cause it looked like it wouldn’t be hard. As if we could just automate going to Walmart’s site, right-click on inspect, and find divs by keywords to retrieve and display them on the web app. We’ve told our instructor that the web app compares prices of groceries from supermarkets to help find the cheapest ones ( sorting them from the cheapest ). She didn’t oppose to it. Now that we got to the point to do the data, she said that to use API it seems too hard for your technical knowledge (we’re only on our 1st term) nor will it be free to access the API. Wtf do we do.. She said we can either use crowdsourcing or use fake data be it randomized or generated by sites like mockaroo.
For crowdsourcing, I’d need to change the pages again, but that won’t be a problem, shouldn’t take that long. But my concern is more about the web app looking unfinished since we’d have no data in the beginning right? Since we won’t have lots of users / volunteers willing to make posts when they find the cheapest stuff in xyz supermarket. We need to present this at the end of the term, which is just in another 4-5 weeks. And unfortunately, our business communication instructor also wants to grade our presentation, and wants us to make a report based on our project, so we might fail these 2 courses if we fail this.
As for the fake data, the things she told us to do just sound like too much to do within our deadlines, and too complicated for us to even comprehend. At first, I also didn’t wanna use “FAKE” data, ’cause what’s the point then? But what other choice do we even have at this point, and our instructor told us that if we were to use fake data, the aim is to make a prototype for when we’re ready to use actual data someday in the future, so we’re just setting everything up and can just replace it later on in the future if we still want to. So I’m warming up and leaning towards fake data now.. the good thing about this is we don’t need to change our UI / pages either, ’cause frankly speaking, making designing & wireframes don’t take long, but coding them in html and css take quite some time for a group project. And sadly my teammates aren’t pulling their weight, not even responding fast. I’m screwed and regret everything now.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
And just in case anyone wanna know what she told us,
This was what she told us :
“Another option is to create a database of fake prices of a small collection of products, for two supermarkets. Use this database to implement your original idea, with the assumption that hypothetically the JSON, or the data can be web-scraped or accessed directly from an API when your business/company decides to go forward with the idea.
you can pretty much keep your same UI screens, and your goal would be to create a prototype that proves your initial concept, of guiding me to go to which store for milk, which store for eggs, etc. Keep your collection of products small for now. To mimic the idea of variable prices, you can have a JS that creates random prices for a small group of staple items, so that eventhough it’s “fake data”, you can still have a random aspect of the prices. We are not concerned with the accuracy of the prices.
When we read from api, json is one of the formats we can get (there’s also others like xml etc). One day if you do get from Walmart api, the format may be json but it’s not necessarily getting a big file with tons of product info, you might just be getting something specific for say apples, depending on the api call that you make. Json is a flexible format.
If you do make a fake Json file (say with mockeroo), say two supermarkets and each has 10 producst, then you can read it into firestore one time only. Afterwards each time (or each day?) the app is loaded you can have a js file that goes into the firestore field for price and gives/assign it a random number. That way you can test your algorithm for finding the cheapest apple for today, and tell me which store to go to, today. It’s timing sensitive.”