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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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