...

Delete comments/edit photo information:

One feature that we missed, and was mentioned by our TA, was one that would allow the users to browse all photos in the site. There currently is no easy way to do this. In hindsight, we should have implemented it, since it would give the users greater freedom in browsing through the photos.

Implementation

Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.

We decided to use Django as the framework for this project, since one of our members was already familiar with the framework. We also made use of Ajax for the autocomplete feature in the search form. We agreed that the feature is important enough for the usability of the site to spend the time making it. 

One minor point about our implementation is the feature that previews the photo that is about to be uploaded. This feature only works in browsers that are equipped with HTML5. In browsers that aren't, the upload page's usability is affected a little, but the uploading still works all the same.

Evaluation

Describe how you conducted your user test. Describe how you found your users and how representative they are of your target user population (but don't identify your users by name). Describe how the users were briefed and what tasks they performed; if you did a demo for them as part of your briefing, justify that decision. List the usability problems you found, and discuss how you might solve them.

We found users from our friends and family. They include...

The briefing and the tasks were much similar to those we did in paper prototyping (see GR3 wiki). The three tasks included searching, commenting, and posting photos. We did not feel any need to do a demo; just a quick overview of the site was enough. In general, we were really satisfied with the relative ease that they were able to perform the tasks, especially compared to previous prototyping.

Here are the usability problems we found:

1) One user wanted to change his username while he was browsing the site using his account. We didn't implement that feature, even though we had CRUD features for both photos and comments. We could have made an "edit user info" page.

2) The "search by photographer" only searches for username. One user tried to search by full first and last names (that he provided in the registration), but he couldn't. We could have made the "search by photographer" to search for both first and last names.

3) One user didn't discover our autocomplete feature, as he was typing too fast into the search box for the feature to manifest itself. As a result, he was left wondering what query he should use to search by type. We couldn't really do much about this, since the delay is internal in the implementation.

Reflection

Discuss what you learned over the course of the iterative design process. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Focus in this part not on the specific design decisions of your project (which you already discussed in the Design section), but instead on the meta-level decisions about your design process: your risk assessments, your decisions about what features to prototype and which prototype techniques to use, and how you evaluated the results of your observations.