Ela Kaya: Hi, my name is Ela Kaya. I'm a User Interface Designer here at DMC.
Jordan Harris: My name is Jordan Harris. I'm an Application Developer here at DMC. And my FedEx Day Project was working on the DMC Ping Pong app.
Ela Kaya: We had redesigned the Ping Pong app to be more like an app game and less like a program. The original design was more text heavy and less imagery, and making it look brighter, and more like an app that you'd want to play with.
Jordan Harris: This is just a simple web page that's build. It's an HTML with the JavaScript, with a SQL back end. It's a SQL architecture which I wanted to try out to see if we could do something to load up all the elements on the page at first and then use JavaScript to loop through them to make the app very responsive and take advantage of some of the animation capabilities, for example, that JavaScript has, and the AJAX asynchronous calls to grab the data back and forth from the app.
Ela Kaya: Well, the way the app works, you simply just start a game and you can select one player, one versus one, or two versus one, or two versus two, and it allows you to pick your player and start the game. And then you can adjust your points during your game and then it'll show winner, and shows the graphic kind of like a Tekken or video game graphic saying winner and then versus. And adding those kind of gives it a little more fun to it and it will process that score, and then it will show who's at the top, first, second, third, and then everyone else below in terms of the ranking.
Jordan Harris: We wanted to work on the DMC Ping Pong app to make it easier to use and much more fun for people to use, and at the same time improve our ranking algorithm on the back end. Before we had a simple grading system where if you beat the person above you, you and that person would switch places, but that made it hard for new players to come in and try and beat top players to get in on the ladder. So now we implemented the new algorithm that would allow even players with little less skill level than the ones on top to actually go up the ladder and have more fun playing.
Ela Kaya: My approach to design was having fun things like trophies, like best improvement, and adding graphics like little trophy icons and stuff to it.
Jordan Harris: Yes, ping pong at DMC is pretty competitive.
Ela Kaya: Even though these FedEx Day Projects are made for fun, they actually do serve a purpose for things that are tested or we make eventually become client projects and can be beneficial to clients.
Jordan Harris: It turned out really well. It works. I had originally started to do this with the first ping pong app, but hadn't gotten very far with it. But this one has a lot more screens and a lot more animation that we put in here. So it was a good effort to try and put all that together and make it actually work. And it looks really nice, a lot better than I had expected.