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- The user had trouble at first finding the information, looking on the main page, and trying to use the "task management box"; when prompted by the facilitator, he found the information quickly on the Floor Plan. Again, this seemed to reflect the same issue as with previous users thinking the task management box is an "omnibox".
Iteration Considerations
- Since people seemed to have a lot of learnability issues rather than any efficiency issues, one idea is that we have a tutorial of some sort, or a guiding version of the interface for first time users so that they can become familiar with the system; more specifically, most people seemed to have issues with not knowing what tools existed for them, and so this seems like a good idea to try in the future.
- Another consideration we have is possibly to take the main page and make it omniscient; that is, right now, the main page is only for managing current tasks in the system, but multiple users seemed to feel that they could use the task management box for all sorts of queries, such as looking up arbitrary room or resident information. We are considering adding additional fields to the data structures and accordingly changing the objects in the data tables to support this functionality, or possibly adding different "modes" to the search box so that the functionality exists and is well organized, though at the slight cost of efficiency.
- We found a major safety issue with the 3rd user when he navigated off the task creation page and lost all the information he had filled in the form; we think that creating a modal dialog for this case to notify the user of what they're doing should be an appropriate fix, as we have with the form submit button.
- For the cases of task submission and task updates not being visible, we think that just doing something like highlighting the border of the inserted task or update to the main page should be sufficient for indicating the changes; this seemed to work for other parts of our interface.
- For the problems with the new task button not being visible, we think that changing the color to something more outstanding, or making the button bigger so that it's more visible may be a good idea.
- For the issue of the "useful information" section of the interface not being used, though the introductory video/interface first proposed should help, we also think that possibly adding something like a large, light arrow in the center of the page between the two columns may help to indicate the relationship between them.
Reflections
We all got a great deal of experience with web programming through this project. We learned how to html, css, and jquery effectively and how to debug the problems we had. One consistent challenge that we ran into was clashes of external libraries. We learned to be very careful of external libraries especially when trying to mix them together. In addition, it would have been nice to receive some guidance on how to organize our files. For all of us, almost the entire code for a page was on one file or split into the html file and .js file. It would have been nice to know how UI programmers break up their coding process. Also, Sumit learned that linear algebra comes in handy when working with movable, zoomable maps.
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