The Snow Day Dashboard was a service that allowed users of the Snow Day SMS Service the ability to customize their experience. Unfortunately, feature creep plagued the project, and was not user-friendly.
The Dashboard allowed me to get a real-world experience of what feature creep is - and how to focus on usability & specificity, rather than throwing a ton of features at a wall and calling it a day.
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Lines of code: ~5,000
Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Frameworks: AdminLTE 2, Bootstrap 3, jQuery 3
Timeframe: April 2019 - March 2020
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The Snow Day Dashboard was used to customize the SMS service in a series of 4 projects encompassing the Snow Day Predictor. Links for other projects can be found below.
Snow Day SMS Service (what the dashboard was customizing)
Snow Day Predictor (web frontend)
Snow Day API (powered the dashboard)
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You can view the source code for this project here.
Login screen for the dashboard, pretty simple and to the point. Once a user entered their number, they would be texted a 6-digit code to actually log into the dashboard.
This is the dashboard home. The home screen was customizable via settings. Some things, like the latest prediction widget, were a good idea, but the rest of it was just extra bloat that didn’t need to be there.
The actual meat and potatoes of the dashboard is the settings page. There’s a lot of tabs, and each image will go through them one by one. The first page welcomes you with too much text, and has a reset all to default button as well.
The Message Customization tab does what it says - it allows you to turn little things off and on in SMS messages. A preview of a prediction text is also shown, and changes depending on what options are selected.
The Message Frequency tab is a cool idea, but in reality nobody used it.
The concept was that a user could change how often they could get messages from the predictor. This would be a good option if I was sending way too many prediction texts. Thankfully, nobody changed the message frequency setting, so the texting frequency was really good.
Another interesting but useless feature was holding messages for a period of time. Again, this could be useful in very edge cases, but it wasn’t. Actually implementing this into the dashboard was pretty challenging, however.
I won’t go into the details, however, as the source code can explain itself better than I could!
Another interesting feature of the dashboard was the ability to customize the home screen, as shown in the second screenshot. You could also change the name that the dashboard greeted you with. Again, mostly useless features given what the dashboard was supposed to do.
Because the dashboard was very much session based, users could also see all the active sessions for the dashboard, and terminate all their sessions if maybe someone managed to hack into the dashboard.
For what the dashboard was trying to do, this feature wasn’t very useful, but was something interesting to implement.
Since the Snow Day SMS Service had caps on how many bounced messages your number could have before being automatically unsubscribed, I added a page to the dashboard to inform users about that information.
As with basically the entire dashboard, this was a cool feature to implement, but really wasn’t useful in the entire scheme of the dashboard.