...
- Cannot find a way to mark the job as "important" -- surprised when found the star.
- Severity: Cosmetic
- Solution: Better indicate star's meaning.
- Had difficulty finding a way to add a label to a job.
- Severity: Major - Adding labels is really important for house managers.
- Solution: Make label adding more obvious. Potentially add it to the right panel opposed to the middle panel.
- User suggested having the "add a label" ability in the left-most column to be with the other labels.
- Could not easily find a way to find all jobs for McCormick -- did not realize search was possible.
- Severity: Major - Ability to find all jobs by location is imperative.
- Solution: Make search more obvious. Automatically create labels for location.
- Creating a new job did not immediately show up in the list because "McCormick" was still in the search bar.
- Severity: Major - New jobs typically take action (assign, updates, etc) and need to be visible.
- Solution: Clear search terms when taking action not related to filtering. Automatically go to "all".
- Attempted to search for "Home Depot" in the job search bar.
- Severity: Minor - Nothing appeared and user later found address book.
- Solution: If term found in address book suggest, "Did you mean to search the address book?"
Going Forward
Write about what we want to do - Jeff
Reflection
As a result of this project, our team learned that using an iterative design process, specifically the spiral model, results in a better product and also reduces stress and time wasted along the way.
...
We really enjoyed this project! Using an iterative design process was very effective, and we feel like we learned a lot.
Going Forward
The focus of building this application was to fit our users core needs; allow them to get done what they need to get done. In this process, we avoided feature pollution and considered adding new features only as soon as we completely fleshed out the current ones. Moving forward, there are a few features we would like to incorporate that will help improve safety, efficiency, and learnablity.
One major feature we would like to add is the ability to select multiple jobs and take action on them as a group. An example of this is selecting 2 or more jobs to be assigned to the same worker, or marked as completed, or given a label. It might not be too hard to simply add a check box next to each job, then appear a menu when jobs are selected that allows for aggregate actions with the necessary ability to undo a given action. We sacrificed this feature as we took into consideration all of the UI decisions and implementation time that we simply did not have.
Another set of features would greatly improve the filtering of jobs. First, jobs would be automatically tagged with their location and filterable by dorm building. Second, a filter for mechanics would be created so that jobs could easily be sorted by mechanic. Finally, it would be made possible to click multiple filtering tabs. This would allow searches to be done by, "Assigned, McCormick, Jenks" for example to get all of Jenks' active jobs in McCormick hall.
Adding in these features would bring the application to a very complete, production-ready level. While the application is really a minimum viable product, there are enhancements we would have liked to add given more time and resources.
The focus of building this application was to fit our users core needs; allow them to get done what they need to get done. In this process, we avoided feature pollution and considered adding new features only as soon as we completely fleshed out the current ones. Moving forward, there are a few features we would like to incorporate that will help improve safety, efficiency, and learnablity.
One major feature we would like to add is the ability to select multiple jobs and take action on them as a group. An example of this is selecting 2 or more jobs to be assigned to the same worker, or marked as completed, or given a label. It might not be too hard to simply add a check box next to each job, then appear a menu when jobs are selected that allows for aggregate actions with the necessary ability to undo a given action. We sacrificed this feature as we took into consideration all of the UI decisions and implementation time that we simply did not have.
Another set of features would greatly improve the filtering of jobs. First, jobs would be automatically tagged with their location and filterable by dorm building. Second, a filter for mechanics would be created so that jobs could easily be sorted by mechanic. Finally, it would be made possible to click multiple filtering tabs. This would allow searches to be done by, "Assigned, McCormick, Jenks" for example to get all of Jenks' active jobs in McCormick hall.
Adding in these features would bring the application to a very complete, production-ready level. While the application is really a minimum viable product, there are enhancements we would have liked to add given more time and resources.