Location

http://web.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/cmannino/Public/BookclubFinal/Bookclub/login.html

(Tested in Firefox on both Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OSX)

Goals and Strategies

During our testing and discussions, we received a lot of useful feedback which we took into account while updating our design. Because of the substantial amount of criticism we received, we reworked our design intensively while taking the following into account:

1. Our visual and aesthetic design was the target of much criticism; while last design excluded any outside libraries other than jQuery, we chose to use Bootstrap to implement an aesthetic and consistent design. We chose to use Bootstrap over other visual libraries because of its widespread support and flexible design.
2. We needed to implement the backend functionality to our code. At the recommendation of our TZ Katrina, we chose to implement our backend using the Parse javascript library. Although we ran into a few issues regarding the database, in the end, it worked out to be an extremely flexible and convenient library. The documentation for the JavaScript version also contained a few mistakes; although it mentioned specifically that developers needn't resave variables when updating a Parse Object, we found that updating a only one field had the side effect of deleting other fields. In order to remedy this, we reset variables that showed this symptom.
3. At the recommendation of our testers, we changed our Recommendation interface to allow logged in users to recommend books to several friends at once.
4. The organization of our Friends page also received a lot of criticism, in particular in the way we had chosen to separate search results from one's current friend list. In order to remedy this, we placed to clearly visible buttons on the Friends List page, that allow the user to show all friends, all students on the network, or to view the results of his search query.
5. The "Browse by Letter" functionality of our Book Search was also deemed superfluous, given the search bar. Our tests showed that most users thought the Browse by Letter bar only encroached on valuable screen space, so we disposed of it.

Contributions

We worked together closely on this project, helping each other debug. However, Hannah and Elizabeth generally worked on backend, while Paula and Carlo worked on the frontend.

• Hannah: Wrote initial friends list and add/remove friend functionality, worked on ratings and recommendations with Elizabeth.
• Elizabeth: Wrote book pages and reading list functionality, worked on ratings and recommendations with Hannah.
• Carlo: Design of Homepage, page layouts and display for user profiles, including choosing and displaying profile pictures.
• Paula: Navbar, friends page layout, book search functionality.