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Our final design has some usability issues.
Starting Starting with the homepage the boxes on the right side of the screen provide feedback that they are clickable by underlining (cosmetic). This is a consistency problem because even though are technically links to another page the are meant to be buttons. This problem could be fixed by having the "buttons" change color when the mouse hovers over them, similar to the current navigation buttons at the top of every screen. The
The usability reported by two users was that when trying to add or edit a project, it was not clear what fields are required (minor). We can easily add a popup when a field is not filled in, as well as using asterisks to define which fields are required, with a footnote denoting whether or not the value was required. From
From one of the house managers unknown should be a possible selection for Floor, Completion Date and Cost, because those fields aren't always know when a project is being started (minor). This would be a simple fix, but adding an indicator to the fields that are required or having an error message appear saying what fields are missing.
The The "email residents" checkbox was unclear to one of the test subjects as to who was getting emailed, whether if it was the email of the person/student who created the event or someone else (minor issue). This could be fixed by changing the text to "Email all dormitory residents" or adding a tooltip.
Another Another usability issue is that when a project from students request is added to the main projects, the project was not removed from the "Student Request" page which caused a lot of confusion with user testing (major). A simple fix would be to make sure that the project that was added is removed from the "Student Request" page.
A A final main usability issue is error messages, this pertains especially to when data was being entered (catastrophic). If something was entered incorrectly then they were taken to page that displayed "Bad Request" although this is better than not displaying anything and putting invalid data in our database, we could create more descriptive error messages to help the user.
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