Eventual Connectivity Antipatterns

[JuanjoBR01]

Hi, Kickstarter team!

My name is Juan José Beltrán, and I am a student at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. As part of our Mobile App Development class, my group, which consists of Carlos Silva, Camilo Falla, and myself, chose Kickstarter as the app to analyze throughout the semester. As we approach the end of the semester, we have extensively utilized your app to examine its strategies, patterns, and areas for improvement. Today, we would like to respectfully present the improvement opportunities we have identified in your app.

The main issues we could find are regarding the eventual connectivity strategies, in which we discovered the lost content antipattern in the following scenarios:

• Starting the app for the first time without internet:

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We could analyze that you designed a network falling back to cache strategy, but, as we launched the app for the first time without connectivity, we arrive to the antipattern described before. Our recommendation is to add an icon to the white screen showing that there's no connectivity as a generic fallback, so it could improve the user experience, because we perceived that a message is shown, but it disappears, so if an user is distracted, then he/she couldn't realize the loss of the connectivity.

• Trying to login without connectivity:

In the sign up screen, we could notice that happens something similar when disconnected, because we are able to press the button, but it doesn't make the sign up call to the backend and the user isn't informed that it is because the lack of connection. Only when connected, the button turns white and performs the call. So, we consider that you could send an AlertDialog when the button is pressed, so that the user knows that the action won't be performed because of the connectivity.

We consider those were the eventual connectivity antipatterns found. Thank you for your! We hope it can be useful for future versions of the app!

Best regards,
Juan José Beltrán, Camilo Falla, Carlos Silva