Objective:
Usability-oriented design of a Web GUI for both desktop and smart-phone operation (restricted screen space)
Minimal Scope:
The task you have to solve with your application is that of letting the user log their activities during a day, down to 15 minute intervals, meaning there can be up to 4 entries per hour and these entries always start on the hour h, at h:15, h:30, and h:45. It should be as easy as possible for a user to arrive at a consecutive list of activities without any holes in between. For activities that take less than 15 minutes, the user will decide under what label and category to log the corresponding 15 minutes.
For simplification purposes, please assume that you are only tracking the period of exactly one day (24 hours), with no carrying over from the previous day or to the next day. It simply starts and ends at midnight.
The purpose is to make the application easy to use even for novice users, but also make it very efficient, since users will only fill in information on the fly if it is extremely easy to do.
At least the following functionality should be supported:
- Log entries should have a category and a label associated with them.
- Categories should at least include the following:
- Work
- Sleep and Rest
- Personal
- On the Move
- Users should have the ability to define their own categories
- Labels should be free form text up to 20 characters
- The user should be able to select and annotate blocks of arbitrary length (15 min to 24 hours).
- The user should be able to get an easy overview of what categories take the most time of the day.
As always, you should obviously start with a user and a task analysis and optimize "performance" of your UI accordingly. Here is a small scenario story blurb as a starting point. Please list any further assumptions you make about your main target user group.
"Chris is an undergraduate at UCSB with a very full quarter class schedule and a lot of extracurricular activities, including breakdancing, Lacrosse, and leading a study group on Astronomy. She also works part-time as a desk clerk for the Office of International Students and Scholars. She bikes to and from school, which takes her 15 minutes each way. She has a boyfriend whom she sees on a daily basis, and she has a clique of four "best friends" that she hangs out with regularly, for example at various Happy Hours. With that many activities, it is not surprising that she needs all the sleep that she can get. She averages about 7 hours per day. Chris likes to keep track of how she spends her time, and updates the log on her smart phone pretty regularly in between her activities. Sometimes, life is just to hectic to do that, however. In those cases she goes back in later and fills in several past tasks in one group. Chris has quite a few specific tasks that occur over and over again on a regular basis, even multiple times a day (e.g., "commute", "desk service", "study", "walk campus", etc.) . She likes to keep track of the names of the friends she hangs out with."Use this scenario and come up with a couple of your own (which you should document and submit), to determine the exact functionality of your logging application. All the tasks that occur should be dealt with efficiently in your UI. Again, if it is complicated to do, people will not want to do it on a regular basis. Even though your UI is simplified to log only one day, the assumption is that the application would be used every single day to log all of the user's activities.
The program should work well on the Chrome web browser, including at your phone's resolution (which you document). You are strongly encouraged to handle different screen sizes and dynamic portrait/landscape adaptation. Note your work on this topic in your documentation.
You need to submit documentation (basically a "user's manual") for your application as well as all the other materials listed on the Project description page.