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The HTML provided our skeleton for everything that was static: each of our bins, including the semesters and our requirement bins, along with their headers and titles.  Then everything else (our classes) were added dynamically through the Javascript; this was done to facilitate the functionality that would be added to each object such as dragging, clicking of the information button, and excluding the semesters a class is not offered.  .  Lastly, CSS was used to pick out classes and unique elements and to give them the look and appearance that we wanted.

There were not many design decisions that occurred in the implementation level that affected the usability of the design.  A few of the implementation decisions made were the use of JSON dictionary to hold all of the information for the classes rather using a server-side programming to dynamically pull information.  This greatly simplified our implementation by allowing us to focus on the usability aspects of our project and not have to worry about our back-end.  It facilitated us having all of our information parsed and working, without having to worry that the server may return something wrong.  This did lead to a small problem where at every update to the dictionary we had to re-add the biology classes, which were parsed by themselves, leading to one of our bugs in our current prototype.  Another design decision made was the use of the JQuery Draggable and Droppable.  It made this feature very easy to use and implement, though in slower computers there is a slight lag, from the mouse and the location of the element.  They may be different if we implemented draggable and droppable ourselves, but it would have added complexity at re-inventing something that already is successful and works.

Evaluation

User Testing

Users were selected from our network. Because QuickPick is currently focused for students in 6-3, we selected MIT students who were 6-3. Two of them knew they wanted to major in CS when they arrived to MIT. One of them was course 2 first, and then switched to course 6. This is representative of the user population of QuickPick in its current state. When we expand to other majors, our users testing population should be expanded and diversified to reflect this change.  There was no demo, but rather we gave them the tasks (included below) and access to the live site on one of our computers. 

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