Design
Overview
The main purpose of SkullWeb is to be an in-house website for the brothers of Phi Kappa Sigma. SkullWeb was designed to offer two main components for its users, house jobs and room reservations. The main design decision we adopted for the task of presenting both of these components was the use of tabs. After the initial sign in of a user they would be brought to the House Job page. At the top they could then click on the Room Reservation tab. This allowed for a quick and fundamentally easy movement between components. 
Another main feature that we changed was the overall color scheme of the website. Initially the site used a gray, white, and black lettered color display. However, the heuristic evaluations presented multiple problems with this including, diminished sight, blending of colors, and an overall uninspired look. We originally went with these design colors because the site was not meant to have flashy colors but was meant to be an effective working and observing environment. In our final design we decided to keep these goals in mind but to allow for a more engaging color scheme. The site now follows the colors of the fraternity Phi Kappa Sigma, black and old gold.
Login Page and User Profile
The Login Page simply consists of the Phi Kappa Sigma crest and a login form, making the page as simple as possible.
Clicking on the user's name in the main navigation tab bar takes you to the edit profile page, where the user can change his account information. All fields except for the last two password fields are pre-filled since these are unlikely to change and to speed up the editing process.
House Job Page
Within the House Job tab we chose to present the house jobs as a list for each week of a month. To navigate through the weeks a simple "Previous, This, Next Week" link system was implemented. A list of the house jobs was the most efficient way to present all jobs to the user. There are usually around 10 to 15 jobs a week, and to present this on a calendar would have created a cluttered interface, while one job at a time would have been very inefficient to see all jobs for a week. Within this list any job that belonged to the user would have a specific symbol and color to depict that it was completed or not.
To help obey Fitt's Law, the whole row that pertained to a user job could be clicked on the change the status of that job. Along with this change in status was also a change in color (green for complete and red for incomplete) and a change in symbol. The final design change we had for this tab was the new placement of the symbol on a user house job.
Originally positioned on the right side of the described job, the symbol has now been placed on the left side of the user's name. As described in one of our heuristic evaluations this now provides a consistent position for all symbols, possibly creating an easer user experience.
Room Reservation Page
The Room Reservation tab has greatly changed from our paper prototype design. Instead of having a persistent form, used to reserve a room, the form is now only visible after the user has clicked on the "Rerserve a Room" button.
Another design decision that was made based on feedback from the heuristic evaluations was the position of the list of reserved rooms and the form described above. The final design now has the list above the form, which creates a more efficient user experience. Users are now able to log on and quickly view the upcoming events without first encountering an empty form and being required to scroll down to view the list.
The final design changes that this tab had were adding a few functionalities to the reserved rooms list. As a user hovered over an event the row would now change color providing the affordance that it could be selected. Similar to the user house job row, each reserved room row obeyed Fitt's Law and could be clicked anywhere on to display all information.
Administration Page
The final page of SkullWeb is not a page that the majority of users will see or interact with, it is the Administration Page. For this reason, the Admin tab was designed with efficiency and control as the main goals. While still provding a clean and basic design, this tab includes many more links and options that the previous pages did not present.
Although built with an administrator in mind, the tab is straightforward and uses real world language to appeal to any and all users. The tab allows a user to add, delete, or edit any feature in the site including: user creation and deletion, room reservation editing, house job assigning, and status of each job.
Implementation
Skullweb was implemented using a combination of Ruby on Rails, HTML, jQuery/JavaScript, and additional Rails plugins. Rails served as the framework for the site, providing a strongly interconnected back and front-end.
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We first had them login as regular users with predefined usernames and passwords. We asked them to find their house jobs, complete them, and tells us what their past house jobs were. From there we asked them to identify other users jobs and had them switch to the room reservation tab. In this tab, we gave them a predefined event time to schedule for, had them manage an event time conflict, and then schedule an event of their own. Once completed, we asked the users to manage their account to change their password and logout. We had the user take a 30-second break while we changed their admin status in the database. Upon completion, we had them log back in with their new password. We told them that they were now administrators and asked them to manage several settings in the admin panel. Since we hoped that most things would be intuitive, we didn't give them any specific guidance; instead, we observed what they tried to do. After letting them explore the panel on their own, we asked them to use the filters and search (if they hadn't done so already). Once we were satisfied that they had explored all the interfaces features, we had them log out and give us their overall impression.
Usability Issues
User 1 (programmer)
- Confirmation of password change appears in a confusing location (visibility, usability)
This user expected the notification that the password had been changed to appear in a different location. He had used many web applications before and was used to certain stylistic conventions. However, this problem isn't serious and can be easily fixed.
User 2 (power user, house job administration experience)
- The admin panel has unnecessary filters (learnability)
This user had managed house jobs by hand previously and was confused by the number of filters that were present on the admin panel. He thought they were unnecessary and wanted some of them to be removed. This can also be fixed by modifying the typus template that we used to produce the administration panel. Right now it provides standard options based on the database structure, and we can customize certain pages.
User 3 (novice user)
- Saving and event with errors clears submission form (usability)
This error was noticed by all users of the system. It was something that we didn't catch initially since we had been entering events with correct details when testing. However, errors like we instructed our users to make will be fairly common, so this is a major design improvement that we need to make.
Reflection
Over the course of the iterative design process, we were able to focus on improving the overall design of the site, by focusing on the individual components. At the start of the project, we had a much larger project in mind, but we decided to tone it down to be able to work on making the most integral components of the site as good as possible. Prototyping our design in several different ways helped us to form a better picture of the site in our heads before we even sat down to code, which significantly cut down on the actual coding time. The computer prototype in particular allowed us to be able to focus a lot of our attention on the back-end of the site, and to make several small iterative changes to the prototype to improve the final product. User testing and heuristic evaluation really helped us focus on improving particular parts of the user interface, also cutting down time working on the front-end. Furthermore, because of the time saved, we were able to mock up, design, and completely implement a brand new feature to the site (the Admin Panel).
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