Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA)

Introduction

Welcome, adventurer! Are you ready for a change?

CYOA is an app for adventurous people who are ready to move to a different city but want a little help from the Magic 8 Ball in deciding. Despite the magic 8 ball outcome, you must decide whether to like/dislike the city before you see another random choice (think Tinder for cities!). Liked cities are saved to favorites, if it's a "Nope", you won’t see it again.

Check out the deployed site!

This project was built as a final solo project for Mod 3 of the Front End Engineering program at the Turing School of Software and Design. The project spec can be found here. The application was built mobile-first, however, it is fully responsive across multiple breakpoints. It also gets a Lighthouse score of 100 for accessibility and can be fully enjoyed using a keyboard only.

Overview of the app

When you first visit CYOA you see a random city, a summary, and some quality of life metrics (to help you decide).

Then you ask the Magic 8 ball -- should I move there?

Regardless of what the Magic 8 Ball says, you decide whether you like the city or not! Get to clicking!

From the favorites page, you can view details again (perhaps remind yourself what you liked about the city in the first place). Don't like it anymore ? Break up with it. We don't care.

Evolution of the Project/Reflections

Day 1 of this project began with an exploration of free and open APIs to use and a decision about my niche audience. Inspired by several of my adventurous cohort-mates I settled on this niche group of people who might be daring enough to move on a whim. I developed two user personas loosely based on people I knew, then made wireframes and wrote user stories. I am really proud of how robust the user stories on my project board are. Writing out the issues systematically even allowed me to catch a gap that my wireframes had missed- if I was going to have favorites cards, I was also need a details view! After the user stories, I began coding. I challenged myself on this project to use something quite close to an agile workflow. I deployed my app immediately on Netlify and worked through MVP stories one at a time and did not create a PR until that issue was also tested in Cypress, showed no errors/warnings in the console and was fully ready to deploy. This was a change from previous solo and gorup projects where the bulk of the testing was done at the end and I found it to be extremely rewarding!

Future Features

In future, I hope to add localStorage to the application so that favorites persist upon refresh and you truly will never see disliked cities again. When I add localStorage, I will also add a button on the favorites page that will allow users to clear their local data and get a fresh start. If users have cycled through all 200-something cities in the API, a message will appear letting them know that there aren't any more options and directing them to the favorites page so they can get that fresh start on their search.

I would also like to refactor my css to use Styled Components and add lazy loading to improve the UI/UX.

Since the app is best experienced on mobile, I would also like to turn it into a PWA and add swipe left/right functionality to the main page.

Setup

1. Clone down this repo.
2. cd into the directory.
3. Then run: npm install
4. Run npm start.
5. Visit http://localhost:3000/ (or whatever URL you are directed to in your terminal)
6. Enter control + c in your terminal to stop the server(s) at any time.

Technologies Used

• React
• React Router
• PropTypes
• Chart.js
• Continuous Deployment with Netlify
• End to End testing with Cypress
• Integration with the Teleport API and Magic 8 Ball API

Contributors

Claire Fields

Ashton Huxtable (Code reviewer)

Ashley O'Brien (Code reviewer)

Scott Ertmer (Project Manager)

Kayla Gordon (Project Manager)