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Our final design was very graphical. We used colorful post-it notes to represent classes. These post-it notes were draggable, and we had several windows in a sidebar on the right which users could drag the classes into. These windows represented classes the user was considering, that they planned on taking, and that they were not interested in. The contents of these windows were saved for the user, so they could return to the site and view their selections at any time. Users could drag both the classes on the Results Page, and classes their friends were taking on the Friends page. We also had a feature that allowed users to print their selected classes.
Search Page
Results Page
Friends Page
Design Decisions
One of our biggest design decisions was to make our interface very graphical and to incorporate drag-and-drop operation. Our reasoning was that this scheme has been growing in popularity, so it would be familiar and comfortable for many reasons. Our alternatives were a more conventional interface that simply displayed all the results in a list instead providing an elaborate graphical interface, and an interface entirely based on text commands, which would be more efficient. The results from our paper prototyping and our heuristic evaluation made us more confident about this design decision, because everyone seemed to like the colorful, draggable interface.
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