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Project Proposal (3/8/04)

"Design of a User-Friendly System for Tracking Employee Vacation Time"


Group Members

  • Joel Clawson
  • Genevieve Hudak
  • Brock LaMeres
  • Kitty Turner

Statement of the Problem


Our project is to use the ideas in the book The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman to create a useable and easy to understand internal travel page for the Joint Office of Science Support (JOSS) at the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research (UCAR). The travel page is to be where the members of JOSS will be able to add, update, or remove travel information for when they will not be in the office.

Rationale


This is a good project because it will create a web page that will actually be used by the members of JOSS who have different levels of experience with computers. Since the members of JOSS are not all experts with computers, it will inspire us to create the site in a way that is able to be used by everybody without having to have (hopefully) an explanation on its use.

Our group will learn how to create a web page that is usable by a wide variety of people while providing natural clues in the page that will not require any explanations to its functionality.

Outline of a Technical Approach


Our web site will allow the members of JOSS to be able to add, update, or remove their travel plans from the page. It will provide the users with a way to view who will be gone on which day(s) and what days a certain member of the staff will be out of the office.

We will use HTML in combination with CGI and/or Java scripting. This is reasonable because either scripting language will provide the ability to create forms that will allow the users to be able to change their travel plans.

A Java applet could be another option, but HTML with a scripting language will avoid potential conflicts with old browsers that are being used around the office.

Implementation Plan


We will look at the current JOSS travel page along with a variety of other web sites to compare the levels of usablity and what makes them easy/difficult to use. The information gathered will be used to create the travel page so it will be easy to use.

References

  • Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things

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