...
- A primary design decision we made was to ground the app around user-contributed images, that is, pictures and thumbnails they take and provide of products that they own. This decision, we found, was effective in that it gave users flexibility as to how they wanted specific items organized, and gave users their own mental model of what the images actually were.
- Simplicity was a key feature of our prototype -- we received positive feedback from all levels of testing that the simplicity of our user interface made it much easier to use. We were initially afraid that the interface would be too simple in that it would effect learnability; however, a reduced layout actually contributed to learnability and efficiency.
- Users are first greeted by our home page, which is a simple layout of buttons. Relative button size corresponds with frequency of use -- that is, the larger buttons are more frequently used than the smaller ones. This data was found from user polling and testing.
- We opted to make collection view laid out with images and with names of the item underneath it. Initially we toyed around with text or image only, but we found during our testing that users responded best when both were available. Clicking the menu button brought up a bottom menu. Long-pressing on an item in the collection would bring up a more detailed menu; however, we found this to be among the most difficult menu for users to find (more detailed in evaluation).
- A simple, non-obtrusive item adding layout was most effective for our purposes. We feared, initially, that users would find it not revealing enough and would have understanding problems; however, users seemed to pick up fairly quickly on how to add items to their collections.
- Adding a new collection has a similar unobstructive interface. This also adds for consistency across our application.
- To share a collection, we enter the sharing menu and input the name and editing privileges. This sharing menu was one of our most difficult design decisions, and the current iteration of it is thanks to input from paper and computer prototyping. Our previous design decisions were too complicated, and we found this current one simple and easy for users to use.
Implementation
- We chose to implement this software on Android because the picture taking functionality translated best on a mobile application. We utilized the Android SDK, coding primarily in Java. The frontend was handled with Android's own XML view layer. The backend was handled with SQLite databases.
- In general, we followed a Model-View-Controller pattern, where the ContentProvider and SQLite abstracted the database information into data models, the XML layer contained the View, and the bulk of the Java code was the controller.
...