Final Writeup

Design

Implementation

Our system, built with a Django backend, allows users to store and save the trips that they plan as well as the personal information used to match the user to particular colleges. The system is scalable in the sense that it would be easy to add additional attributes (top majors, etc.) as new search criteria in the future, but some aspects of our implementation have led to latency issues in loading different pages.Each school has attribute values associated with it for each of the different search criteria (GPA, SAT, and ACT); users who are logged in will also have attribute values for each of those criteria. The search functionality(the "Find Schools" button) runs a matching algorithm between student attribute values and college attribute values.

We combined the "Select Schools", "Plan Itinerary", and "Review Itinerary" options into one page using JQuery UI Tabs.

We used Google Maps clustering in order to 

Each event is tied to a particular college and a particular timeblock. When the trip dates are changed, CollegeRoute will

The latency associated with loading the search result page was one of the primary usability issues with our interface. Our interface gives the user some feedback about the latency associated with that page through the use of a "loading spinner" and text which indicates that our application is "Finding schools for you...". However, we do not direct the user to a cached version of the search result page if they want to revisit their school selections; the page only displays once it has been reloaded. We did not analyze the implementation bottlenecks that were causing these delays, but in future work, we would want to understand better and address the source of these delays. We would also want to implement a stronger result caching scheme, either in our data representations or in the manner in which the tabs are loaded.

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1. Calendar view does not default to selected trip dates - Major (Fixed)
   Both Users 2 and 3 could not find events on the calendar originally because the calendar view did not default to the selected trip dates. Therefore, users had to navigate through an unfamiliar calendar interface to the dates they desired. This issue was not fully apparent to the developers because the start date of the trip defaults to today. This issue was easily fixed by changing a setting in the calendar initialization.
2. Users must hit refresh button to apply new date range - Major (Fixed)
   After selecting the dates, Users 2 and 3 struggled to apply their changes; they expected that the new dates would take effect immediately. They did not realize they had to hit "Refresh Events" in order to apply their changes. This issue 
3. Users did not understand the map affordances - Major
   Users 2 and 3 did not select schools from the map or click on the map in their initial run through the tasks; older users may be less familiar with viewing and clicking on map clusters. User 1 discovered the affordances associated with the clusters and the map pins by accident. Help text would be a convenient way to allow users to discover these affordances.
4. Users did not immediately understand the relationship between displayed search results and map display - Minor
   The displayed search results only include those search results that are within the viewport of the map. Text which explicitly labeled the list of results could help explain this (e.g., "Results in map view") 
5. Users did not understand the ordering of the search results - Minor
   User 3 did not realize that the schools were ranked according to how well they matched the user's search criteria. Using more explicit text for the results list woud also clarify this issue; a header like "Top Results in this Area" could be an effective fix.

General Feedback

All in all, the feedback for CollegeRoute was positive. Users were generally excited about the idea and thought that the overall experience was well-designed and implemented. Very little comments were negative in such a way that required immediate and drastic change or improvement; instead, any constructive criticism seemed to point to features that could be implemented and added on top of the current design.

Users found the website to have high usability and seldom ran into dead-end situations. While some features of the current website can be tweaked to improve usability, most of the functionality has been streamlined through our iterative design process.

CollegeRoute is very simple to use and also to learn. Users were very excited to be able to save their own information by creating an account; the idea of saving itineraries, returning to the website, changing said itineraries was very appealing.

Multiple users commented on the desired functionality to be able to directly view trip logistics and book traveling tickets from CollegeRoute. While this was on the horizon for most of the semester, the ability to interface with actual transportation providing agencies is very possible and would be a welcome addition as a feature to CollegeRoute.

Reflection

Our iterative design process benefited from a solid understanding of the problem; this familiarity with the problem was developed during the need-finding stage of the project. We quickly narrowed down 

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