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New Map and Data Representation Interface
Figure 2.3. The final map interface combined the initial map page where users entered their destinations with the map page that displayed data about other people in the area. This was more consistent with the real world and across the TRavelTech site.
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Initially during paper prototyping, we had a sequence of three pages: an initial map page to enter a destination, a calendar page to select a date range, and a data/summary page to display other people traveling to a close destination within a similar time range. Originally, we represented our data in the form of Figure 2.1. Several users had trouble deciphering this graph. In order to make our design more simplistic and consistent with the real world, we decided to change the data representation page to a map, seen in Figure 2.2. Finally we combined this map page with the first map page where users enter their destination information. This made the design more simplistic and reconciled inconsistency issues with the first and second map pages. The summary page's map was slightly different from the map on the first page because it had adjustable bars to change the date range and change the radius. For many users, they were confused by the two really similar but slightly different maps. They also could not see direct feedback as they were setting their traveling dates and destinations. Moreover, we decided to discard the adjustable bar for dates and instead allow users to adjust their date range directly on the calendar. The radius adjuster was kept.
Figure 27.1. Users found this interface difficult because people are not typically represented as line graphs in the real world.
Figure 27.2. The new interface allowed users to adjust the radius from their destination as well as the date range.
TravelGroups
As discussed earlier in Design Decisions, we decided not to include TravelGroups. They were, however, originally an important part of our design. As can be seen in Figure 8, TravelGroups were essentially a collection of people traveling near the user during a similar date range. They can be saved on and then accessed on the trips page. We decided that this was unnecessary because users can easily change small trip details that may result in a slightly different travel group.
Figure 8. TravelGroups of people traveling near you during a similar date range. Deprecated.
2 Implementation
We decided to implement a web application based on HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JQuery, with a PHP backend.
2.1 High Level Discussion
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