...
Each file is a model, responsible for one of the mySQL tables. Each model receives and action attribute, and some extra attributes if needed and returns a jSON of the results, which the jQuery parses and presents to the user.
Reflection
We learned a lot through out the process of designing and redesigning ChildFeed. One of the main lessons from class that we learned first-hand was the difficulty of finding an optimal balance between efficiency and learnability. One of the main problems we found during testing is that often when we tried to make a feature more efficient, we ended up sacrificing learnability and vice versa. For example, our original design for Check-in/Check-out was more efficient than our current one, but it was much harder to learn how to use. However, as we continued to test and evaluate our designs we steadily progressed towards better balances.
Another lesson from class that became clear to us over the course of the iterative design, was the difficulty of predicting how users would interact with our design. There were many times where we would take for granted that a particular feature was simple and easy to use, but user testing revealed that that was not the case. For example, we thought that users would easily understand how to use our Report Lunch feature without any assistance, but a number of users required that we showed them how to use it before they were able to do it on their own.
We do not have many regrets when it comes to our decisions regarding design process. For the most part, we used concrete evidence and critical analysis when deciding the direction of our project. However, there are a few things we would do differently if given the chance to redo our design process. In particular, it would have been in our best interest if we fully decided which features we wanted to implement in our final project. We did not entirely decide how we wanted to make the daycare worker’s previous posts visible until late into implementation. Had we decided that we were going to implement it in an Archives page early on in the design process, we could have tested a design during paper prototyping and we would have had had more information to work with and more time to implement.
We do think that it would have been nice to fully design and implement the parents’ side of ChildFeed, but we do think that we ultimately made the right decision in not doing so. During the design process, we quickly realized that just implementing the daycare worker’s side of ChildFeed to the level of usability that we wanted was going to take the entirety of the amount of time we could afford to the spend on the project. Thus, we felt that if we fully designed and implemented the parents’ side of the interface, we would have ultimately sacrificed some usability on the side of the daycare worker.
One risk assessment that we made a mistake on, was the risk of not finding daycare workers that would be willing to test our product. We assumed that since user testing only takes 5-10 minutes per user and since ChildFeed is directly related to their profession that daycare workers would be more than just willing to participate in our user testing. Thus, we waited until we were done implementing ChildFeed, before we emailed the daycare workers in the TCC located in the Stata Center. We thought that there would be more than enough daycare workers who would be excited to test our project, but it turned out that we were wrong and that they did not show nearly as much enthusiasm as we expected. Had we known that there might be difficulty in getting volunteers for our user testing among daycare workers in the TCC, we would have started the process of finding test users among the daycare worker population earlier. However, we believe that we were still able to more-or-less accurately evaluate our project with a less representative user population. We believe that our choice of testing ChildFeed on users who had experience taking care of young children gave us a good sense of how well daycare workers would have been able to use our interface.