DXTREME Mobile for C# developers–the Design
I must add a caveat to that title: “Such as it is”.
(See the Introduction to this series here.)
In essence, I want to keep the work flow of the Citizenship Test app pretty simple to suit the main devices it’ll run on.
When you run the app, I envisage a plain home screen: the title, and a couple of options. The first option allows the user to review all hundred questions and their answers. I see this as a straightforward list of Q&A items and the user would flick to scroll the list up and down. An alternative would be to just list the questions in a scrollable list, and then have the user touch a question to navigate to another screen to see the answer. Although uncomplicated, I feel that this could be cumbersome since the user would then have to navigate back to the question list. A user experience that is not overly onerous, but the back-and-forth is still a little inelegant I think.
The second option from the start or home screen would be the testing option: display a question and accept input from the user. What I’d like is a text box and some natural language processing to analyze the answer and check it against the actual answer. I’m not too sure about that just yet (NLP is not my forte), but we’ll see. Somewhere on the screen will be a button to navigate to the next screen with the next question. Since the actual naturalization test consists of ten questions of which you have to answer at least six correctly, this will also be the format of the testing option. There’ll also be a final screen (not shown) that would grade your answers.
The back button on this screen would not go back to the previous question, but to the home screen. Pressing it would cancel the current test.
As you can see, the way I’ve designed this app is to break it up into several steps (that is, screens), going from the simple to the more complex. That way, as we build it, you’ll get a flavor of how to develop these kinds of applications with DXTREME Mobile.
Next time: the Home Screen.