Introduction
CheddaRReserve is our solution to the ongoing scourge of jenzabar-quality institutional web interfaces as applies to campus room scheduling. It allows users to quickly and intuitively choose their own paths through the decision-making process of reserving a room. The interface is designed to supply information right where it’s needed, to give clear cues about what input is required from the user, and to update views automatically when input is received.
Making all this work in a web-based environment requires both extensive client- and server-side scripting and careful layout of the static HTML features; as a result our previous prototype was forced to use 100-percent canned data. With this prototype we have the beginnings of real, intelligent interaction, and the need for blocking is greatly reduced. The third interactive prototype will be an even further advancement and will, we hope, make the experience of evaluators much more seamless and realistic as we begin to perfect continuity of data between pages.
For this study, we had to settle for a collection of more-or-less correct-looking pages but with full interactivity only on some pages and no data continuity between them. Therefore, we made it our objective to find out whether the currently working functions behaved according to users’ conceptual models, and whether they announced themselves with sufficient salience that they would be utilized (particularly the time-saving room filter functions). We have had ample feedback on the graphic design of the site as part of our low-fidelity and first interactive prototype.