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Jorge Daniels would follow a similar process to sell his labor or exploit arbitrage opportunities. When he logs-in, his assigned Midnights will be highlighted in color. After nagivating to the Quotes page, he will choose to execute a Sell Limit, instead of Buy Limit. Since Jorge is also interested in watching for potentially high ask prices, he populates his watch list with Pots for all days of the week. Rather than submitting 5 requests, Jorge simply leaves the Date field blank while indicating Pots for Labor type. His watch list now displays 5 rows for Pots - one for each day of the work week. If at a later date, the price for Pots labor on Wednesday falls, he can simply buy it back at a profit.
Analysis
- Error prevention: This design has good error prevention. There is a Confirm dialog box after making any orders, so the user can double-check the price and midnight to make sure it is correct. Additionally, it is easy to add/delete midnights to our Watch List with the Add button and Delete buttons on the same page.
- Visibility: Showing the user’s midnights in another color is good visibility, so the user can easily see what his midnights are. The Trade Menu is also good for visibility. It shows the current bid/ask prices, so you know what range the new price should be in. One bad visibility point is how to return to the Home page once we have reached the Quotes page. The user can do this by clicking the banner at the top, though this is not very visible.
- Learnability: The Get Quotes search box is not very learnable. It’s good for experienced users who know the names of what to search for, but for inexperienced users, it may be unclear what they exactly need to type in the box. The Trade menu interface is rather learnable, with lots of information being displayed in the pop-up. Additionally, adding and deleting thing to the Watch List is also very learnable, using common widgets to accomplish these tasks.
- Efficiency: The Get Quotes search box is very efficient, since it allows users to go straight to what they are looking for. Having the Watch List on the home page is also very efficient, since the midnights that a user indicates are important to them are shown right when they log in.
Design #2
Home Page
After log-in by MIT certificate, the user arrive at the home page. On the left-hand side is the ubiquitous navigation bar, where the user can perform several actions, that will either lead to other pages, or log-out. On the top is the ubiquitous recently-posted-trades widget, which displays the last several trades posted to the website (that is, requests for trades, and not completed trades). Finally, in the center of the screen is the content of the home page. There are two objects in the main panel: a table which displays the assigned midnights for the week, and below this, a chat room that any users can post to. Both of these objects will only appear on the main page: thus, the user will need to return here if he desires to see either of them.
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