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- JQuery Mobile is a new framework. It is still a bit immature and heavy to run on a mobile phone. Sometimes it is very slow to load and render.
- Sinatra provides a limited amount of functionality that would not allow us to scale up fully as opposed to Rails or Django
Evaluations
_Users: _We evaluated our interface on two users, representative of two of the user populations. They were interviewed during the GR1 for user analysis. One of the users was a freshman, representative of the novice user population. The other one was a sophomore, representative of the Office Socialite group.
Description: Two users who were briefed about the Mashcal and what it is for. They were asked to
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.
Reflection
The biggest thing our team took away from the iterative design process is the idea that we are not the user. Throughout all of the prototyping and user testing, we were continually surprised that interaction methods we thought were intuitive confused users. Users also surprised us by attempting to use the interaction methods in ways we did not intend. Especially on a mobile app, it is necessary to conform enough with the platform that users can think in their "iPhone paradigm" but be unique enough to make the app intuitive and exciting.
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