Team Betamax

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Team Betamax

• Adam College
• Doug Ellwanger
• Jeremy Freeman
• Jonathan Tse Dec 7, 2006

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Motivation

• Frustration with Olin portals
• Scattered content
• High technical knowledge
• Dissimilar requirements

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Project Goals

• Unified Olin information source
• Intuitive, friendly interface
• Customizable content

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Learning Goals

• Interface design process
• Teamwork
• Web programming

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Main Scenarios

• Adding new content
• RSS feeds, bookmarks
• Weather, sports
• Customize layout
• Find contact information

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Personas

• Cross-section of Olin students
• Assumptions
• technically confident
• adept at using the internet
• not always buzzword-savvy

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Gordon

• Junior
• ECE
• Ypsilanti, MI
• 20 years old
• Mildly conservative

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Haley

• First-year
• Undeclared (EBio)
• Redwood city, CA
• 18 years old
• Apathetic

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Isabel

• Senior
• ESystems
• Danbury, CT
• 22 years old
• Liberal

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Low-fi Prototype
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Low-fi Evaluation

• Primarily evaluating ease of use and feature
  visibility
• Results
• Configure Me non-optimal
• Classes not visible enough
• Search option includes Olin?
• Personal opinions on Calendar

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Prototype Changes

• Search bar conformity
• Different label for configuration
• Configuration drop down
• E-mail/calendar highlighting

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Version One
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Heuristic Evaluations

• Better than Blackboard
• Bugs
• Most problems were consistency related

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Major Heuristic Evaluation Problems and Actions
Taken

• Too cute or overly verbose
• Simplified standardized dialogue
• Configure Me moves items on screen
• Tabbed Configure interface
• Search results are confusing
• Tabbed Search interface
• Irreversible Actions
• Added undo feature

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Incorporating Feedback

• Added academic calendar and Olin links
• Increased information on e-mail and personal
  calendars
• Added more Google results
• Fixed bugs

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Prototype Demo
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Future Progress

• Increasing drop size area
• Edit bookmarks and other boxes (back-end)
• Customized color scheme
• Saving user preferences

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Lessons

• Importance of visualizing change
• Communicating buzzword/jargon-free ideas
• Were members of our own user group
• Defining end of the user interview process
• Being extremely aware of mental model of users

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Questions

• ?