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The design of EZ-FIX allows housing managers the ability to quickly process and assign jobs to the house mechanics (mechanics in this context refer to anyone employed by the facility staff for repair related purposes). EZEZ-FIX was designed to allow users (house managers) to easily filter and view information about repair requests, which are known by our system as jobs. As seen in the image above, a user is able to filter jobs by clicking in on the left-most column, view a listing of jobs in the middle column, and view specific information about a selected job in the right-most column.
During initial user testing of our computer prototype (both the heuristic evaluation and in-class demo) we received feedback that the color choice should be re-examined. Some people felt that the red of the buttons signaled indicated importance or error. As it is true that red is usually used to signal error or importance, we felt that the application had a general red look and feel; there is enough red on the page (logo, all buttons, shadow, etc) that the red does not pop out to the user and look as if it requires attention. The red and grey colors were chosen to give an MIT feel to the application.
One major design decision that was influenced by the heuristic evaluation is the structure of the middle panel. Initially, the jobs listed in the middle panel were grouped into three different categories: unassigned, assigned, and completed. This allowed the user to quickly discern the status of a repair job and find unassigned and assigned jobs quickly and efficiently. We found this to be an issue during the heuristic evaluation, though. It became a problem trying to keep a consistent layout with a varying number of jobs in each section; listing all jobs in a group didn't work well, fixed heights of each group didn't work well, and finally hiding empty groups (zero jobs) didn't work well. For this reason, we pivoted and build built the middle panel to list all jobs and provided labels to allow the user to discern job status. Every job is listed and has a colored label used to indicate indicating the status of a job (green = assigned, blue = unassigned, orange = completed). Job assignment is indicated with If the job has been assigned or completed, a picture of the mechanic responsible for the job if it has been assigned or completed, otherwise the picture is default. This job is associated with the particular job. Or else, a default picture is chosen. This allows for quick scanning of a particular mechanic's jobs.
There are different events that trigger a job to be moved to the top of the job listing. Creating Adding an update on a job moves the job to the top, while assigning a job or marking it complete does not. Typically, an update on a job happens by someone else (the mechanic) and indicates some form of status change (need for materials, etc). Assignment of Assigning a job is done solely by the house manager and since because he is making the change, it's not important that for the job to be moved to the top for more attention.
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