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The implementation was designed with a web interface in mind. On that note, a combination of HTML, Javascript, and CSS was used to direct the proper visual representation of elements. The main element, and also challenge, of the project was the map. Both the visual appearance of the map itself and the databases that supplied information about population, rainfall, current towers, and newly added towers were generated using Fusion Tables and the Google Maps API. Given the scope of this project, this was the correct choice as trying to implement the same sort of functionality from scratch would have ended disastrously. However, using the API proved to be very difficult at times. A lot of the necessary functionality was not available in public API and therefore, sort of had to be hacked together with various workarounds. On the positive side, using Google Maps allows us the time to implement a very appealing visual style, and the familiarity of every user with the API definitely increased usability.
There are certain features that we were unable to implement due to the fact that their difficult exceeded the scope of this class. Most did not affect the usability of the design, however, and so overall, the implementation was a success.
Evaluation:
Unfortunately, due to the nature of our project, we were unable to get in contact with three users from target audience of our project (since the user population is fairly small). Instead, we used one target audience member as well as two students taken from the MIT population (although not from the 6.813 roster). The most important effect that this may have is that our target user population would like have extensive training with the software and would also be much more intimately familiar with the problem at hand. With that in mind, this is the information we presented each of our users with prior to the test:
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