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Our project was designed as a web-app using htmlHTML, cssCSS, jQuery/javascript, phpPHP, and a MySQL back-end. We did not use any frameworks, but mainly because we were new to all of these the technologies involved and were unaware of the benefits of other approaches.  We had to limit the focus of our project to a single browser (Chrome) because of the variability of interpretations of CSS across the browser landscape; this severely impacts usability, and given more time we would have worked to improve compatibility with other browsers.

Because there was no other way to access the user's microphone from their browser, we were forced to use Flash for the recording widget.  This completely breaks compatibility with Safari, and introduces yet another technology that our site must be dependent on.  Luckily, we found the WAMI Recorder, which allowed us to create and manipulate a Flash-based recording widget using javascript and HTML.

We had to partition the work among three people, so we each worked on separate pages; if we had not communicated effectively and reviewed each other's work, the internal consistency of our interface would have been greatly diminished.  We took turns working on the common style elements in the default stylesheet, so there were a couple instances of someone's "improvements" accidentally breaking another person's work.

Evaluation

The user test was conducted on a laptop with the user in control and the facilitator and observer behind the user on either side. Our users were all MIT students who had no previous experience contacting policy makers. While perhaps more technicaly inclined than other users in our proposed population, these test subjects still had the esential trait we were looking for: a lack of experience contacting policymakers.

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