I know this should have been posted last week, but better late than never (as long as the reason for the delay is justified). There were a couple of events to attend and people to meet last week, which meant that the regular schedule was postponed. The Big Data event held at the London eXcel was excellent and very insightful and gave me the chance to meet some very interesting people over the course of the day. The emphasis seemed to be on industrial IoT as well as softwares used within corporate environments, which goes to show how the general public often overlooks the power of Big Data that hide in the background, and yet somehow affects their everyday life. I also met a number of interesting people at the Ealing Business Expo hosted at West London University. Pushing the project forward, now requires emphasis on the business side, so going out and meeting people is imperative to the operation, as well as sourcing the services required for a successful operation to run.

In terms of the technical side, I did manage to hit a road-block with some components, which I hoped would be a lot smoother. Some issues were encountered with the gesture handler in particular, where simultaneous gesture recognition is, perhaps causing a bit of a problem. As it is paramount to the user experience, I want to ensure that this particular component is done correctly with a consistent and repeatable framework that can be applied throughout the application and implemented within other components. The complexities added, when the user experience is thought of, as well as how to tie in the UI to keep our dynamic approach consistent.

For the project to succeed, especially as our app and software is targeted towards non-technical users, it requires a seamless experience from start to finish, as well as the ability to modify and change the data at any point. The great thing is that the use of a NoSQL database makes it easier for non-conformative data to be amended post-creation, hence giving us the ability to amend time-series data with new fields if that is the requirement for a user.

Data presentation is the next menu on the item, as nothing simplifies the user experience like a well thought out user interface design of how data entities should be represented. That’s why we will be using the data tags to help us understand how users like data presented for different product services and anything that they may use to represent the particular data that they want to handle. Naturally, this will also have a knock-on affect for how company consumes and manages data and so we will try to use the layout of each individual data item to help the younger businesses to improve the way that they set data templates or frameworks. This will help with forward compatibility as well. Should they wish to upscale their business, and will help ensure uniformity, and continuity in knowledge transfer within an organisation.

The user authentication flow is complete to the extent that a user can manage their account effectively. It does, however, require some thought and perhaps addressing external authentication with either a JSON web token or a token authentication flow for users to integrate external web hooks and such and implement data from elsewhere, naturally, this will be a future implementation as we are currently focused on smaller businesses that may not be using such a software or start-ups that wish to understand how their data can encourage data centric, decision-making helping them to succeed with a business.