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The final design of our interface comprises four tabs and one pop-up. Our interface diverges dramatically from our original paper prototypes. We made many design decisions that we felt would contribute to learnability, simplicity, and efficiency.
Design Decision I:
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Combined Tabs and Moved to Top
Our paper prototypes had six tabs arranged in a somewhat arbitrary order on the left-hand side, while our final design has four tabs arranged horizontally above the content. This change dramatically increased efficiency and learnability.The original tab names were CurrentAssignedMidnights, CurrentOpenTrades, Contracts, CurrentOpenSwaps, Watchlist, and LogOut. While these names and their associated pages allowed for better specialization, this specialization proved to be unnecessary given the nature of the underlying environment, size of the user population, and scope of the content; indeed, we found it more efficient and intuitive to combine the information on certain tabs.The new tab names are Home, Schedule, Quotes, and WatchList. Home includes content from CurrentAssignedMidnights, CurrentOpenTrades, and Contracts. A user is initially assigned to no more than three midnights a week; this is due to the fact that the user population is approximately 30, and there are 77 open spots. Given that each midnight takes, on average, half an hour to complete, we believed that a rational upper bound on the number of midnights a user was assigned to, or traded for, was ten; this is quite a small number, and a list of all ten would not be large enough to merit its own page. Similar logic dictated that the typical user would be involved in only a handful of trades, and have completed a handful of contracts. Thus, the efficiency of the website could be much improved if all of this data were displayed on the same page.We chose to put this information into the home page because it is the information any user (with the exception of a user whose goal is pure speculation, which we do not believe will happen) would wish to see before doing any actions: what midnights s/he is assigned, what midnights s/he is trying to trade for, and what midnights s/he has successfully traded. By pulling it all together and presenting it in a compact manner, the new design allows for two distinct and common tasks: a user at home can analyze his/her current situation and decide to take action from there, all without navigating to a different page; or, a user on-the-go can quickly check for updates. The old interface would require a considerable amount of navigation to achieve the same tasks.
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Implementation
Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.
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