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We made the decision to use django mostly because of its learnability - none of us had experience making a web server, and we were impressed with the quality of django's tutorials and documentation. Our TA mentioned at our GR5 meeting that django was less good than some other options for plugging into a preexisting partial implementation; we can't speak to other options, but we did spend a lot of time rewriting in server-side python features that already existed in client-side HTML and javascript. The implementation we wound up with, static pages that hit various URLs to get the data they need to display, feels a bit piecemeal; it might have been more elegant had we written everything with django to begin with, learned to use its rendering feature, and constructed pages entirely on the server side.
Our code can be found at https://github.com/kpan/sitterPlan
Evaluation
For our user tests, we provided the following briefing:
We're SitterPlan and our goal is to help babysitters and parents coordinate their schedules to find optimal times for babysitting jobs. Our site allows for two type of users - parents and babysitters - who will each see a different view of the site. Parents can use the site to specify times that they'd like a sitter, and babysitters can use the site to look for jobs.
And tasks:
From the babysitter interface:
- Find an available job and apply for it
- You are willing to babysit between 5pm and midnight every day except Friday. Update your schedule accordingly.
From the parent interface:
-You want to hire a sitter for either Friday or Saturday 7-10PM so you can go to the movies. Make a posting for this job.
Here are the results from our user tests:
User A is a mother of a toddler who is used to scheduling babysitter jobs. She had no major problems performing the tasks and said that the interface was "very useable". When she created a job she started by adjusting the slider to only show times between 7 and 10pm. She quickly figured out how to use the flexible schedule option, but also left a comment saying that either Friday or Saturday would be good, which indicates that the interface might not be as clear as we thought. She also adjusted the slider when entering her schedule on the babysitter interface. When asked she said that she originally wasn't sure what the slider did, but said that it only took her a few seconds to figure out that it was just adjusting the calendar.
User B was a babysitter throughout high-school and worked for several families. She had no major issues completing the tasks. When asked to update the schedule, she initially went to the calender page and was initially confused when there was no apparent way to manipulate it. She also initially interpreted 'available' as her schedule being available. When creating a job, the painting interface mis-clicked due to the use of a track-pad, causing frustration. She also expressed uncertainty over what information to convey in the job title. We also discovered several bugs after testing. Calender blocks don't expand when the title overflows the box. Two jobs cause a doubling of the blocks in each location, making the interface look very bad. Babysitter schedule updating does not work correctly in Safari on a Mac (not one of our supported browsers).
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