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The following is the 'Home' page. It is intended to provide a visually appealing introduction to the site, and offers links to every other useful page in the site. Based on heuristic feedback, we increased the clickable area of the buttons to include the entire button and not just the text. Also from our heuristic testing, we removed the slideshow and instead kept a still video.
There was a major issue, in which the alignment of the menu bar changed drastically depending on what page was being displayed. We fixed that issue after receiving feedback and having it pointed out.
The "Budgets" page provides a representation of the user's yearly budget. The column on the left shows the amount of money available, and the amount of money allocated to projects within a particular month. The column on the right shows the months of the year. The table on the far right shows the recent projects created or updated, and is automatically edited whenever a user makes a change elsewhere on the site.
The "Building Status" page presents an overall view of projects taking place in the building. We completely redid the building status page, since we were not able to implement the original version described in our paper prototype. We chose to use a Gantt chart to display a visual representation of any number of projects and their estimated completion time. As This was further motivated by the heuristic testing, when it was pointed out that the original design was a little confusing. As of the time of submission, we have not connected this page with the backend/database, but should give an idea of what it is intended to look like.
The "Projects" page presents an overview of all of the projects that have been created for the building. New projects can be created, and existing projects can be modified by clicking a row on the table. For the Projects page, we aligned the "Add New Project" form fields based on feedback received from the heuristic evaluations. We also made the table columns unresizable by the user. We made it more obvious that the table rows were clickable by having the mouse cursor change to a pointer when it hovered over the rows. Users were able to find the "Update Projects" form much more easily.
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We provided an "About" page to enable users to identify the site creators (and contact them if necessary). Also it was intended to provide a bit of information about the website. This was added based on feedback from the heuristic evaluation.
Implementation
We decided to implement our website using HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the frontend, the Flask web development framework for the backend, and SQLite for the database. Flask is written in Python, and while it is similar in principle to Django, it is much more lightweight, and therefore is easier to set up and use. It has a templating system for web pages that reduces the amount of code duplication.
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We learned that UI design can be a long and iterative process. We were constantly challenged to change our assumptions, and learned that often, the smallest of details matter. Most importantly, we learned that we needed to be flexible with our designs and be prepared to change them even if they passed user testing if it would be impossible to implement.