Adding Global Search and Extending Bookmark Views in Open Event Android

When we design an application it is essential that the design and feature set enables the user to find all relevant information she or he is looking for. In the first versions of the Open Event Android App it was difficult to find the Sessions and Speakers related to a certain Track. It was only possible to search for them individually. The user also could not view bookmarks on the Main Page but had to go to a separate tab to view them. These were some capabilities I wanted to add to the app.

In this post I will outline the concepts and advantages of a Global Search and a Home Screen in the app. I took inspiration from the Google I/O 2017 App  that had these features already. And, I am demonstrating how I added a Home Screen which also enabled users to view their bookmarks on the Home Screen itself.

Global Search v/s Local Search

Local Search
Global Search

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If we observe clearly in the above images we can see there exists a stark difference in the capabilities of each search.
See how in the Local Search we are just able to search within the Tracks section and not anything else.
This is fixed in the Global Search page which exists along with the new home screen.
As all the results that a user might need are obtained from a single search, it improves the overall user-experience of the app. Also a noticeable feature that was missing in the current iteration of the application was that a user had to go to a separate tab to view his/her bookmarks. It would be better for the app to have a home page detailing all the Event’s/Conference’s details as well as display user bookmarks on the homepage.

New Home

Home screen
Home screen with Bookmarks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home screen with Bookmarks               
Home screen Demo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The above posted images/gifs indicate the functioning and the UI/UX of the new Homescreen within the app.
Currently I am working to further improve the way the Bookmarks are displayed.
The new home screen provides the user with the event details i.e FOSSASIA 2017 in this case. This would be different for each conference/event and the data is fetched from the open-event-orga server(the first part of the project) if it doesn’t already exist in the JSON files provided in the assets folder of the application. All the event information is being populated by the JSON files provided in the assets folder in the app directory structure.

  • config.json
  • sponsors.json
  • microlocations.json
  • event.json(this stores the information that we see on the home screen)
  • sessions.json
  • speakers.json
  • track.json

All the file names are descriptive enough to denote what do all of them store.I hope that I have put forward why the addition of a New Home with Bookmarks along with the Global Search feature was a neat addition to the app.

Link to PR for this feature : https://github.com/fossasia/open-event-android/pull/1565

Resources

 

 

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