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The Photo Map tab displays a map of campus with pins on locations where photos are available. When the user clicks on the pin, they can see the name of the building and a link displaying the number of photos present for that building. When they click on the link, they can scroll through all the corresponding pictures.
Originally this tab was just called Photos. After confusion from our test users about seeing a map when they clicked on photo, we changed the name to Photo Map. During user testing our users also praised our improvement on the Facebook photo overlay. They loved how you could see which pictures were coming next.
Reviews Page:
The review page shows the reviews about a certain topic, in this case Parties. On the reviews page review pages we wanted to have all the information about the user next to the review they posted . As since some students might want the opinion of younger students when they want information about campus parties or if some users would relate more to students of different majors. or from a certain major.
When the user clicks the button to add a new review we added When adding a review we wanted you to have the option of creating your their own topic if you they wanted to . even though the current topic is automatically filled in. The reviews are sorted chronologically, with the most recent at the top.
Implementation
Our implementation uses the Facebook Connect API in order to sign into the website. We decided to use this instead of having the user create a new username and password, seeing as it would be more efficient and easy for the user. We used Facebook Connect to obtain the user's profile picture, name and educational history. In fact, the application only lets users post reviews and ratings about their own college, so we used the educational history in order to access the names of the schools they have attended.
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- Really liked the icons for the ratings, especially the drug culture one
- She was really interested in reading the quick facts and she said they provided really useful information that was easy to skim over
- Went directly to the Photo Map tab when asked to find the what the student center looked like
- When she was looking at the tag cloud in the Student Reviews section she was confused about what the acronyms stood for (UROPs, CPW, etc.)
- When looking for information about the Hispanic groups on campus, she wasn’t initially sure what topic to look under, so she clicked on the list view in order to see the topic names more clearly
Reflection
During this process we learned just how important testing can be. After each task we gave someone, there was always an epiphany. The user would say something that related to a use case that we never thought about.
We also learned how important it is to have good team dynamics. A problem we faced initially was that none of us are very opinionated and we didn’t know which project to chose or where to start in the design process. Each person on our team had different strengths but they didn’t always match up to the demands of our project. Sometimes we ran into issues of different technical skills especially when it came to the database implementation. The decision to use Ruby on Rails instead of PHP seemed insignificant at the time but we later found out that it was difficult to integrate with the front end. Since only one person on our group had experience with Ruby, it was hard for the others to help out with the backend. When it came down to crunch time, our final implementation suffered because we couldn’t work together to solve the problems.
As a team we learned how the terms used in our design have such a huge impact. Several times we found that adding more descriptive text or changing the wording of something made a huge difference. We wanted to keep the text short but the user frequently asked for an extra word on a tab or a button.