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Scenario
Design 1
Design 2
Design 3

Scenario

John is a computer science major at MIT. He goes to mancourses.mit.edu to choose his classes for the upcoming fall semester. The website automatically logs him in based off of his MIT Certificate. The last time he logged in, he had inputted the classes that he has taken already. Now, he can view the classes he still needs to take in order to complete his major and the General Institute Requirements. He notices that two of his required classes are only offered in the fall, so he preregisters for them since he has the prerequisites required to take each course. He chooses three other classes to complete his schedule based off of the course evaluations, and then finalizes his semester schedule. John uses Google Calendar frequently, so he selects the option to sync to Google Calendar so that he can view his course schedule along with all of his other events.

Now that he has chosen his schedule for the upcoming semester, he decides to plan ahead by seeing which classes he still needs to take in order to graduate. From this list displayed on ManCourses, he can see dependencies of certain classes on other classes. Using this information, John creates a tentative schedule for each remaining semester that he has at MIT. Now that he knows that he can graduate without taking more than 4 classes per semester, he decides to crack open an intoxicating can of “root” beer and relax for the rest of the day.

Design 1

Overview
Storyboard
Analysis

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One major benefit of this design is that it is fairly versatile, so we should be able to easily make minor modifications post-implementation tweaks to improve efficiency and visibility without changing the overall scheme.

Design 2

Overview
Storyboard
Analysis

The interphase is situated with a main frame located at the bottom.  This frame is what is used to browse and extract all information about classes.  There are 4 modes: general browsing (no buttons selected), previous classes taken (previous classes button), current classes (current registration button), and classes required to graduate (required classes).  The search bar above helps shorten the list down based on the request.  When clicked, the calendar at the top right enlarges and can be synced to gcal.

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This design focuses on the idea that the most difficult aspect of our tasks is the searching and the quality of such search.  Thus, the modes given are strictly used as specialized searches through the general subset of classes.  The design is incredibly learnable, as the modes are easy to see, and switch between.  There are some issues with visibility, and that its difficult to compare classes between time periods (in that it's hard to look at previous classes taken and see how they align with classes needed).  Error prevention is done so that it is easy to maneuver between lists of classes, both adding and removing them with ease.  

Design 3

Overview
Storyboard
Analysis

This interface divides the screen into 3 panes. The leftmost pane gives a visual representation of the courses necessary to fulfill the requirements of the category (GIR, major, HASS). The middle pane shows all available classes which fulfill the selected requirement. The right pane gives the class schedule based off of the current selection. Clicking on each course name in the middle pane will bring up another window showing the details of the course. The goal of this interface is to provide the users with all information required to choose classes in a single screen (maximize the amount of important information visible in a single state).

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Design 3 sacrifices learnability for efficiency and visibility. The interface is slightly more complicated to learn than our previous designs, but one nice part about it is that most important information is visible all the time (few different screens of information). The current schedule, choices of classes under a specific requirement, and course requirements and dependencies are all visible at any given time. Because of this, it is very quick and easy to access and view important information. In terms of error prevention, the only user errors possible with the system would be registering for two different classes which meet at the same time. This is taken care of by the user interface because the courses which conflict with the currently selected courses would be grayed out (and thus could not be selected). Anchord3-2d3-2Storyboard

<image: design 3 (to be scanned)>

Anchord3-3d3-3Analysis