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Deletion behaviors, by contrast, caused almost no issues during user testing, with the exception of some questionable button labeling (see the evaluation section below).

Implementation

\[Shoshana, you can talk about how using HTML and CSS might have complicated the underlying structures of our design, making it more difficult to deal with.  Also, the popup thing we did might be good to mention here--if we'd used Ruby on Rails or Flash or something, it might not have been an issue.\]

Overview:

We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript (with jQuery) to implement the front end of our application.  Since the front end was a deliverable in and of itself for this project, we coded the front end before the back end.  We ended up storing information in the front end that ideally should have been stored in the back end.  For example, the layout of the calendar system (how many days in each months, which months begin on which days in which years, etc.) was all in the front end in Javascript.  The back end MySQL databases contained three tables -- for notes, deadlines, and events.  XMLHttpRequest Javascript objects were used to execute PHP scripts.  The PHP scripts called the appropriate MySQL commands to fetch/store the information from/to the databases.

Overview:

We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript (with jQuery) to implement the front end of our application.  Since the front end was a deliverable in and of itself for this project, we coded the front end before the back end.  We ended up storing information in the front end that ideally should have been stored in the back end.  For example, the layout of the calendar system (how many days in each months, which months begin on which days in which years, etc.) was all in the front end in Javascript.  The back end MySQL databases contained three tables -- for notes, deadlines, and events.  XMLHttpRequest Javascript objects were used to execute PHP scripts.  The PHP scripts called the appropriate MySQL commands to fetch/store the information from/to the databases.

Some important design decisions we made in the implementation:

We coded the front end using HTML and CSS.  In order to implement dialog boxes, we used <div> tags and hid them when appropriate.  This design choice caused the resulting dialog boxes to be slightly awkward.  They don't have the ability to be moved by dragging on the toolbar and they don't have default minimize and close buttons.  If we had used Ruby on Rails or Flash or some other development tool, designing dialog boxes would have been more native and simpler.

We decided to access the back end using XMLHttpRequest objects and PHP scripts.  This enabled AJAX to be used.  The alternative would have been to populate html forms (hidden, if necessary) and submit them with the PHP script as the target.  This would have been more confusing because it is synchronous and would have refreshed the entire page.Some important design decisions we made in the implementation:

How implementation problems may have affected the usability of the interface:

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