For my Human-Computer Interaction class, we were divided into groups to work on creating an user interface. Here are the specifications for the choices of the programs that we could do.
I submitted number two. This was one of my Mac programming ideas. I want to implement it on the Mac, but there are a lot of these types of programs out there already. A lot better than what I had thought of. I may just try to get some Mac programming under my belt. It was chosen as one of the projects that people wanted to do. Hopefully, they come up with an interesting interface.
A recipe management program for cooks. It will allow the user to create a recipe entry with the ingredients and their measurments as well as the steps in cooking. The user can rate the recipe and add informational notes to each. The recipes will also be able to handle conversion to metric units and to scale the recipe for differing amounts of servings. The user can search for a recipe by meal type, ingredient, by number of servings, by occasion, by rating and by keyword. The recipe program can integrate with a calendaring system wherein the cook can plan a day, week or month’s meals. From the meal plan, the recipe management program can generate a shopping list.
The one I am working on number three, the textbook exchange program.
A software program that allows students to sell used textbooks to one another. It would work for both graduate and undergraduate courses. Students could enter information on books they want to sell into the computer along with a price as well as search the site for textbooks that they need. They could search by department, course name, number, or alphabetically for courses and books. They could compare prices as well as the seller’s description of the books, and if interested contact the student. If a sale is made, the book would be removed from the site.
I should’ve chosen the other group’s project (number 7). My group sucks. There are no Mac users on my team and therefore the team lacks ingenuity to approach the problem differently.
For example, we had to refine the requirements and come up with the user interface to the program. At first, one team mate was basically dismissing this as a simple program, because he looked at it from the searching aspect. Yes, that is simple. We’ve all seen google. We’re all familiar with the search user interface idiom. So let’s do something different. Let’s look at the student exchange aspect of the system.
In my book review of Leonardo’s Laptop, the author was wrote about the future of human-computer interactions and defined a new paradigm for it with the simple mantra of “collect, relate, create, donate.” We could apply this to our problem.
Let’s look at the problem from the seller’s standpoint rather than the buyer. How should the seller input his information? Standard input form? Boring. Let’s create an interface that allows the seller to define the books he has selling and allow him to watch as the orders come in. Perhaps, a look at ebay should guide us. How does ebay handle the selling of things? And how about adding an RSS feed of your own books? And how about the notifications style found in the Mac’s mail program?
We chose to do a data entry program. How boring. Perhaps a little search. Still boring. Like I said, I should’ve chosen the other program. Or at least done mine.
