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This part of the project took a fair amount of work, but we were happy with the results. We were able to produce a usable interface suitable for heuristic evaluation. Starting work earlier could have made the process less stressful.
We used the The jQuery Mobile framework , which was helpful in building the interface quicklywas great for prototyping Hubbub's interface. However we had performance issues that forced us to replace it with Twitter Bootstrap before starting on GR5's backend. jQuery Mobile is great for prototyping, but is not currently suitable for final interfaces. We also learned that you don't necessarily need a framework specifically for mobile HTML. Twitter Bootstrap worked well for our application, and is general purpose.
While jQuery Mobile wasn't the best framework, we think it was better than using no framework. Implementing grid layouts and UI widgets by hand would have significantly slowed us down.
We chose to create stub feed items for our computer prototype. However, this actually masked the issue of how to handle items the user has already read across sessions. Keeping stale items indefinitely hurts the readability of the feed, but automatically removing items may cause the user to miss out on informationUsing canned data actually masked one problem - how to handle items being marked as read? We don't want to keep stale items indefinitely, but we also don't want to remove items the user still wants to see. Increasing the volume of canned data wouldn't have helped; a finite set of data will be exhausted significantly faster than data from a stream. Looking back, we could have implemented some sort of canned feed item simulated input streams by creating a stub generator that periodically added items to the feed, to simulate input streams.
Heuristic evaluation was very helpful and we incorporated several suggestions from our evaluators into GR5. In particular, we realized that the filtering interface was confusing, and devoted more attention to its learnability in response to feedback. Our evaluators did not disagree on any points, so we were able to make changes that would satisfy them all.
GR5 - Implementation
Our final implementation reached relative feature-completeness, incorporating live data from all four of our intended information sources. We didn't have time to implement the "Share" feature, but it was a non-essential task. We could have managed our time more wisely by prioritizing tasks and completing more important tasks first. However, there was simply bad timing for our group for GR5--one group member was out of town attending CHI, and another had a paper deadline around the same time as the GR5 deadline.
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