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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 glean for updates. The old interface would require a considerable amount of navigation to achieve the same tasks.
We changed the arrangement of the tabs from vertical and on the left to horizontal and at the top. We were able to do this because we had a smaller number of tabs, and so only one row would be required. This proved to help the aesthetics of our interface, and also saved valuable screen real-estate. Our design is, overall, very horizontally centered. Left-aligned tabs would have forced the tables in Schedule, Quotes, and WatchList to shrink in size (thus reducing visibility), and would have made the home page much less visually pleasing.
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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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