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Figure 8. TravelGroups of people traveling near you during a similar date range. Deprecated.
2 Implementation
2.1 High Level Discussion
We decided to implement a web application based on using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JQuery, with a PHP/MySQL backend and MySQL for storage.
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we use MIT's scripts server for hosting. User authentication is implemented with MIT certificates, which are also utilized to pull user information (name and email address) from. This may be confusing that users aren't required specifically to log in, but we expect that most users with certificates understand their purpose. There are two sql tables: one for user information and one for all of the trips. The site collects any information that the user is inputting and when the user does an action that requires table lookup/modification, the site passes the information via URL to the other page (home -> my_trips, my_trips -> home), which executes the relevant command. The main usability problem with this implementation is that any action that requires a table lookup/modification requires a page reload, which as it stands resets any of the user's current partial input. Most of our fields and buttons are controlled via javascript, and we utilize the Google Maps API for our maps. We chose Google Maps for both its ease of use in implementation but also in hope that the users will be familiar with the interface and controls.
Our graph that shows nearby travelers on a day range larger than yours is only visible once the user has inputted a location and selected a start and end date. While this was implemented this way because otherwise the information could be misleading, the fact that the graph is at times not showing and then being displayed may cause potential usability problems. We also decided to implement the graph with dummy data to show off its functionality, as there would need to be a large amount of data entered into the system for the graph's output to be relevant.
2.2 Potential Problems
Several aspects of the interface design proved to be much more difficult than anticipated, and some of these struggles may have negatively affected the overall usability.
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