Future Work on Akamy-Rentals

06 May 2022

The current state of the Akamy-Rentals project is incomplete. However, great progress was made on implementing the website that users will interact with to lead to the creation of a smart contract. All the steps and UI components leading up to the deployment of a smart contract inside a blockchain are completed and functional. Specifically, new users can create and sign into their accounts, edit their profiles, learn about smart contracts, and create, edit, and sign smart contracts.

Specific functionalities are described below

When the project is completed, publication would be the next step. An Etehreum related conference would be an ideal venue for publication. Ethereum conference events are listed here. The target audience would be homeowners and leasers. Homeowners have a property they are looking to rent out to a tenant and leasers may have a space they are looking to lease to companies, such as office spaces or restaurants, for example.

The incomplete parts of the project that need to be completed before publication involve the Ethereum blockchain. There are additional improvements that could be made to the UI, but since they mostly refine the existing functionality to make it easier to create smart contracts, it is not necessary to complete them before publication. However, the audience’s first impressions of the project would be more positive if the improvements were completed before publication. Creation of a smart contract in the blockchain absolutely needs to be completed before publication. The blockchain ensures that the smart contracts are immutable, rent comes in on time and is fully paid, and provides a greater level of assurance for both homeowners and renters. The blockchain is what makes Akamy-Rentals appealing to its target audience due to its uniqueness and automation. Due to difficulties in getting a timer to run as intended, we were unable to deploy smart contracts to the blockchain. The button that is supposed to start a timer when a smart contract draft is ready to be created on the blockchain starts as intended, but stops when the user navigates to another page. We were unable to resolve this issue.

In an enhanced version of the project, user feedback from people who did not contribute to the development of Akamy-Rentals would be needed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the project. Specifically, feedback from homeowners would be most desired because tenants do not choose whether or not they want to create a smart contract. However, tenant feedback would be useful in ensuring that the UI is easy to use and intuitive. Similarly, since one of the goals of Akamy-Rentals is to make the contract process easier between homeowners and tenants, it is important that the process to create a smart contract is easy and its use of blockchain understood. If the process to create a smart contract is more difficult than the current process to establish a homeowner tenant contract, there will be no appeal to use Akamy-Rentals. On the other hand, user feedback can also help identify components that users like. For example, from our user feedback on the current project iteration, many stated that they liked the large font of the monthly income component at the top of the dashboard page. After obtaining feedback, the project would be enhanced further to polish it for publication. The more polished the project is, the more presentable and appealing it will be to the target audience.