You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 7 Next »

< Back to Project Home

GR2 - Designs

Scenario

Frodo Baggins, a recent college graduate, is working under a government contract to find optimal locations for new WiFi towers in Africa. He is new to using ANB, and is learning mostly by intuition because his boss is too busy to give him detailed training.

Frodo's first task is to pull data sets from a remote shared database. His data sets are:

  • satellite coverage
  • current WiFi towers
  • rainfall
  • demographics

Once he has this data, he wants to overlay the data sets on a map of Africa to help him evaluate how good the current WiFi coverage is. He wants to quickly find regions that have insufficient coverage. For each of these regions, he needs to find the location(s) for new WiFi towers to optimize coverage. Periodically, he'll want to share his findings with his co-worker, Samwise, and get his input. When he thinks he's finished, he needs to share a report with his boss.

Designs

Design #1

Frodo opens

Design #2

The idea behind this design is to keep it very clean and simple. Manipulation is largely mouse-based and allows for a lot of real-time visual updates in response to the user's actions.

This first screen would be the screen that the user first sees upon opening a file set. At the top, there is a title bar indicating that the user is in analysis mode. There is a flat very lightly colored gray scale map of the area in question (pictured here is the northern two-thirds of Africa). Similarly to Google Maps, the user can drag around the map with the mouse, as well as zoom in and out using the controls on the left. In the top left there is a button that toggles between month and year (other option can maybe be added) and corresponds to the slider on the bottom. For instance, if you are in month-mode, the slider will move through monthly averages of the data from January to December while in yearly mode, it would move from 2000-2012 or something of that nature. On the top right of the screen, there is a button titled "Layers" which will generate a drop-down list upon click that will contain all the possible data sets the user can add to the map. The large arrow on the right of the screen will shift the user into the next mode (which for lack of a better name is referred to as the edit mode in this design).

If the user clicks the "layers" menu and selects an option, "demographics" (here written as population) for instance, the first that will occur is that a box with the name "demographics" and a small "x" will appear to the left of the "layers" menu. In addition, the data set will be added to the map. Color and specific shading can of course be determined later, but let's assume for this design that demographics is represented by the color red. In that case, a light red area representing the entire year's population area will appear on the map, and a bright, solid red will indicate the area covered in that
specific month. There would be a similar outcome in yearly mode as well.

On this screen, we can see more details in Analysis mode, in terms of overlaying data sets and popping open the "layers" menu. It becomes more apparent as to how the user would use the program to visualize the exact set of data he'd like to analyze.

When the user is done setting the data, he can hit the arrow on the right side of the screen to move forward. The first thing to occur after this action occurs is that the title bar will change to "edit" mode (here written as "edit hotspots"), and a pop up window will appear as the background fades out in some way indicating inactivity. The window will indicate some backend sort of magic occurring (not the focus of this class, so we will just assume it exists)

  • No labels