Design 3
This design focuses on live search, allowing the user to quickly see search results and get instant feedback on if his search is too specific (no results) or still too broad (page upon page of results.) The user can still filter by a selection of classes and/or skills in order to find matching students.
Design 1: inputting requirements and live search
Storyboard
Sketch |
Explanation |
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Professor Smith first goes to the home page, where he is presented with the search form. He can see, at a quick glance, that we have 19-24 students in the system (6 per page, 4 pages.) He can then begin adding classes/! |
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He first wants to quickly view a student's profile, because one caught his interest. He clicks on the ID card on the search page. He would see an overlay like this. At this point, he could select the student or close the popup. The overlay can also be closed by clicking on the grey, transparent overlay (the squigglies in the drawing.) |
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After closing the overlay, Smith begins to search by adding a few classes. He notices the results are beginning to thin without the page reloading. All of the sudden, we only have four results. |
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So, he decides to add some skills now, to further thing the candidate pool. |
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After getting only three results, Smith clicks the check box for each student, selecting them. (Their ID box changes color as well to signify selection.) He then clicked "E-mail students" and went on to find this page. |
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He then types up an e-mail title and body to send to the students. |
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Sadly, he was just informed midway through the process that he can only have two students, so he decides to remove the last one by clicking the red X. |
Analysis
Learnability
In terms of learnability, this scheme is a bit harder to learn at first. You would have to click around a bit and play with it. However, nothing that is hard to learn is hard to change. Specifically, the points of difficulty would be:
- Hitting enter to add a class/skill (Solution: Change to have an "Add" button or link like in our other proposals.)
- Knowing that clicking on a card will show more information of a candidate (Solution: Pointer mouse hover, tooltip text, and maybe a "More info..." link at the bottom of the cards.)
- Knowing that to select you must click the checkbox in the upper left (Solution: A message saying "Please put a check next to the students you want to e-mail." at the top of the search results.)
- Ideally, they would also open the overlay, click the "Select" button, and then notice the checkbox is checked. (This is ideal because it avoids instructions.)
- I don't think the checkbox will be hard to notice, but I'm not sure how all users will react with it.
Most users will figure out the live search and other features by playing with the item. For example, as soon as a user adds a class, the results will visibly change, giving them insight that it is a live filtering system.
Summary: Harder to learn than a simple search form, but nothing should be too difficult.
Efficiency
This is most likely the most efficiency system. It is efficient in terms of how long it takes to find qualified students. The other systems require a page refresh (i.e. more clicks), while in this case you can easily add all classes with just your keyboard (type, enter, type, enter, type, enter, etc.). At that point, you can add skills without waiting on a page refresh as well. The fact search results are shown with the search form also allows us to update the form without hitting the back button in the browser.
Summary: Very fast and quick to find students.
Safety
This system should be very safe to use. The only limitation on safety would be on the e-mail page. On this page, you can remove a user you want to e-mail. The only way to get that name back is currently to reload the page. There are ways around this that were not drawn in above. For example, you could have the userbox be a checkmark instead of an X for deletion. By doing this, it would signify that you're not e-mailing that candidate. The candidate's box could grey out if unselected and be blue if selected, signifying inactive vs active.
You can easily undo search parameters by clicking their red X to remove them.
Summary: Lack of safety on e-mail page in current design, but easily changeable. Should be completely safe overall.