MVP and Future Plans

MVP

Confronted with the fully-fledged feature set of commercial language learning applications, our team made the early decision to create a minimum viable product that reflects the essence of what we find crucial in such a product.

  • User experience: mobile-friendly, fast and seamless processing of user interactions
  • Backend and API: layered, robust, RESTful, maintainable, and flexible enough to service front-end needs
  • Database: normalized and withstands scale
  • CI/CD: establish continuous deployment pipelines

Moving Forward

Our core team has plans to continue support the maintenance and development of Alexandria.

Enhance User Experience

  • Full user access and ownership control:
    • Add full suite of user access tools, including user password reset.
    • Offer users full control, where words and translations can be deleted as well as updated.
  • Shared data: Users are currently only able to access texts and translations based on their own inputs. Going forward, users will have the choice of accessing a global pool of shared texts and translations, further reducing usage friction, take advantage of other users' contribution, and making the experience more dynamic.
  • Import/export:
    • Import / export functionality for interoperability with other learning tools.
    • Import / export functionality for additional file formats, e.g. ebooks formats, subtitle files
  • Additional language support: Alexandria currently supports 10 languages. We would like to expand the number of languages supported after additional testing.
  • Admin dashboard: Allows admins to make changes to user accounts from the front-end.
  • Mobile optimization: Additional development to further enhance user mobile experiences.

Backend

  • API enhancements.
  • Extended functionality to facilitate the improvements outlined above.

Testing

  • Alexandria back end currently has unit tests with decent coverage in place. Front end has some unit testing and Cypress testing in place. More tests for both sides of the application are currently being worked on.