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Home/Profile Page: Upon logging in, Sarah immediately sees the bulletin page, full of other students' advertisements. Her profile information and travel plans are visible on the left of the screen. The bulletin updates every five minutes. Please see attached PDF.
Map: To find people traveling to New York, Sarah clicks the Search tab at the top of the page and is confronted by a world map and a list of sample groups as well as groups she created. To narrow down her search to people in New York, Sarah double clicks on New York until she is zoomed-in. Sarah then clicks and selects all people in the immediate area of New York, and drags them to a group. A new group has thus been created.
GR2-D3-1.pdfThis feature is easily learnable and demonstrates direct manipulation. It is also clean and a good change-up from the other text-based components (Bulletin and Search).
Search: To see if there are other people in her New York group who are looking for roommates, Sarah clicks on the Search tab at the top of the page. By typing into the search textbox and applying the correct filters, Sarah can see a list of other people’s advertisements for New York roommates.
Design #4
Home Page: Sarah is immediately shown a "pick a location" page for the purposes of both searching locations and adding The page as the website-wide TravelTech logo that acts as a link to the homepage and also My Info and Logout buttons that take Sarah to her account page and log her out, respectively.
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Pros of Design #4: Design 4 provides the user with a very interactive and intuitive interface that allows for adding trips and conducting searches with very little typing and effort. The results are also shown in an a fresh style that lets the user see specific timing and distance details. The system is very efficient once users learn it because data can be quickly entered with just the mouse. This design is also safe, it allows the user to change any of the inputted data, though the user may have to navigate through a few pages to do so.
Cons of Design #4: The design may be initially confusing to some users because of the lack of instructions and the dependency on a user's prior experience with Google Map-style apps. Also, while the results are displayed in a new fashion, users tend to have a hard time to read graphs and process large amounts of data at once. Because of this, learnability would be the largest issue with this type of design.