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We also made the user specify time of day in a consistent manner. The snapshot below shows how each event must start on the hour or half-hour. This allowed us to handle time in a consistent manner, but it is also a bit annoying for the user since he cannot specify his desired time, which may be something as general ‘in the afternoon’. Also, the time of day scroll bar always starts at 12:00am and only reaches to 9:00am before it is necessary to start scrolling. This is a bit annoying because most events will not be done during this time of the day, meaning that scrolling to the desired time will almost always be necessary when creating an event.
After After an event is created, the user is brought to the ‘MyCalendar’ page. As we saw in a number of screenshots above, the event names are clickable, bring the user to an event page, shown below.
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When it came to implementation in GR4 and GR5, our approach was fairly standard for MIT, partition the work and hope that fitting the pieces together into a final product at then end is not too difficult. One major issue for us was that our prototyping up until that point had focused on spatial layouts and pages but not enough on designing elements on the page or thinking about look and feel. This led to some confusion and disagreements come crunch time.
I I don’t think we realized as a group just how big the jump is from prototype to implementation. We all felt very comfortable after GR3 with the vision for our site in terms of spatial layout, navigational features, and what should and should not be clickable. But the jump from GR3 to GR4 was pretty large and we ended up scrapping a number of features. This included the ability to update event information, messaging between users, event privacy settings, creating an event that occurs weekly, and alternative visual representations for a user to manage his events. We dropped some ideas because we thought they would be too difficult or time consuming, but mostly they were removed from the plan because they seemed peripheral to the site’s main goal of helping to organize the short-notice, quasi-important social events that make up our every day lives. Interestingly, when we were adding a feature to a piece of paper it did not feel like much of a commitment; it was not until we started building the site that we had to decide what facets of the project were most important and which were not.
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