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The single most important action a user can perform is the creation of a timer. In order to facilitate this, we created a very simple yet powerful timer creation dialog. In the date dialog, the user is able to enter a vast array of date terms which are fuzzily matched to an output date. They can enter terms such as "5 min", "today at 6pm", "10/26/1990" and they will all be converted to a date. The user is also given instant feedback as to whether or not the date is valid. This streamlining of the date input was a result of the input to our first round of user testing. We originally had a calendar and clock widget to input time, but it was inefficient and difficult to use.
Figure 2: Notice the instant feedback provided by the date input.
Implementation
The TeamTimer application consists of an html5 client written using jade, coffee-script and less that communicates with an API server written in python with flask that exposes a mongodb database. The modular separation of the client and server allowed us too quickly mock and test the front-end design with our test users before investing the time to developing the backend.
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