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Rails applications are structured according to a model-view-controller (MVC) pattern, and are expected to adhere to a series of guidelines. This "convention over configuration" philosophy benefits the designer by ensuring that if the guidelines are followed the low-level details of the application will be handled automatically. This allowed us to have the first features up and running in a short time.
These two characteristics (MVC arquitecture and convention over configuration) greatly contributed to the implementation of the mobile version. In Rails, by registering a mime type 'mobile' and naming the views accordingly (e.g., 'edit.mobile.erb'), the framework will render the corresponding view when the application is accessed from a mobile device. This enabled the mobile version to be implemented with the addition of only 120 lines of code (7% of the application total).
Evaluation
We found three undergraduates for the user tests. One has a calendar with all of her assignments for the entire year, one makes a list for each upcoming week, and one just keeps everything in his head. We managed to test someone who matched each of our original user scenarios.
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