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This page would not exist without the valuable feedback we got from the heuristic evaluations. Previously users would not be able to see what calls they had and instead had to cancel them from memory, but this page provides much more transparency so that the user is much more in touch with the actual model.

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.

Our project was designed as a web-app using HTML, CSS, jQuery/javascript, PHP, and a MySQL back-end. We did not use any frameworks, mainly because we were new to all of 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 HTMLHTML and javascript.

Our original intent was to create our own database of representatives, but we ended up using the Sunlight Congress API instead.  Every time users search with their zip code, the API is queried.  This means our site will stay up-to-date even after election season, with no more work on our end.  But it also means that if the API ever becomes unavailable our site will be completely unusable.

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.

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