Griddle+Report

Griddle Report

We are Ghassan Abu-Ghaida, Amir Majedi, and Janahan Sivaraman. We didn't like how hard scheduling things with friends was. We wanted something that let us see our friends' calendars, making it easy to know who is available when. Once you can easily see who's available, you can quickly create events and get together with friends.

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We collaboratively came up with the idea for Griddle, validated our used needs tasks, determined system requirements, wrote the annotated references, created our own designs, and worked on parts of the prototype. Ghassan interviewed two friends for the User Needs section, compiled the prototype, wrote the usability test plan, sketched the final design, ran the usability test with two users, wrote the final report, and wrote the final write-ups. Amir and Janahan interviewed one friend each for the User Needs section, ran the usability test with one user each. Amir updated the prototype. Janahan put together our presentation.

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Our audience included UMD students, ages 17 to 24, and UMD faculty. Griddle was designed so students could to get together with friends and fellow students, be it for lunch or other random meetups. Students were also be able to use Griddle to find out when their professors are available to meet with. Professors could use Griddle to schedule out-of-class meetings with their students.

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Doodle.com lets users create polls with times as options and allow user's to vote on the times that work for them. The problem with this solution for us was that it doesn't work quickly. There's no way of getting instant feedback from friends about whether or not they're free in 15 minutes. We wanted something that lets users instantly see what times work between their friends. Whenisgood.net lets the user choose the times that work for them from a calendar as a poll. This solution has the same problems Doodle does. Tungle.me lets users see other users' calendars and request meeting at times the other person is listed as available. However, this was built for business uses, and doesn't have a social interface that you would expect college students to use.

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What we wanted was something that allowed users to easily create their own accounts, and put up their schedule. They could then easily friend other users and see what those friends are up to. We also wanted Griddle to let users easily create new events and invite people to those events. Griddle could look at all the invited users' schedules and determine an ideal time for the event, or the event creator could manually select an event time. In order for users to easily find friends and events, we needed a search feature that allows users to easily find friends and events through an search bar that could do both. That way, if they searched "Ghassan," they could find "Ghassan Abu-Ghaida" and "Ghassan's Birthday Party." After searching, the user could friend "Ghassan Abu-Ghaida" or choose to attend "Ghassan's Birthday Party." Since Griddle is about easily scheduling things, we also wanted a seamless way for users to see who is presently available, so they can quickly arrange an spontaneous event, like lunch with a few friends.

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[Log In Page]



On the log in page, the user can either log in or register. All we required to register was a user name, a password, and an email address.

> Login Button takes you to Home Page

> Register Button takes you to Home Page

[Home Page]



On the home page, the user can update his or her status on the left using the status box. The user is also presented with a list of friends who are currently free, with the option of clicking "What Is Everyone Else Up To" to see what their busy friends are currently doing. In the middle of the page, the user can easily see his or her calendar. On the right, the user can see what events are the most active events on campus. On the top of every page, is the Griddle bar. When the user clicks Griddle, he or she gets sent back to his or her home page. The user can also search for friends and events using our search bar, access invites by clicking the Invites button, or create a new event by clicking the "Create New Event" button. By clicking the down arrow, the user can change settings and log out.

> Clicking on a Friend's Name takes to you Friend's Page

> Clicking Search takes you to Search Page

> Clicking Create Event takes you to Create Event Page

> Clicking Invites takes you to Invites Page

[Friend's Page]



[Invites Page]



A list of invitations appears on the invites page. Information such as event name, event time, and event creator are displayed. The user has the option of attending an event or not attending an event.

> Clicking "Attend?" determines that you are Attending the event

> Clicking "Don't Attend?" determines that you are Not Attending the event

[Search Page]



On the search page, a list of users and events relevant to the search appear. If any friends are listed under People, an option to visit that friend's page appears. If any non-friends are listed under People, an option to friend that user appears. Users are also able to choose to attend events found listed under Events.

> Clicking Go to Profile takes you to Friend's Page

> Clicking Friend? friends that user

> Clicking Attend? determines that you are Attending the event

[Create Event Page]





Users are able to create new events by inputting an event name, invitees, length of event, and date of event. The user has the option of manually inputting a start time or allowing Griddle to determine the best start time based on the invitees schedules by clicking Show Best Times. The user also has the option of making an event private.

> Clicking Show Best Times shows the time that works for every one > > Clicking Date/Start Time/End Time shows a dialog box allowing you to select the date or time

> Clicking Cancel takes you to the Home Page

> Clicking Send Invites* creates the event, sends invitations, and takes you to the Home Page

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For our usability study, we had users sit in front of a computer and complete a series of tasks. These tasks included registering, logging out, logging in, changing their status, creating public and private events, going to a friend's profile page, accepting invitations, and searching for a new friend. We ran four users, college students between the ages of 20 and 22, under our usability test. These users included a male student majoring in mechanical engineering, a female student majoring in physics, a male student majoring in mathematics, and a female student majoring in communication studies and family science. Through our testing, we found several flaws in our initial prototype.

Initially our prototype did not explicitly describe username and password requirements which was unusual for users, so they asked us if there were any requirements. We decided we should make that clear on the page that users register on. Also, hitting enter after filling out a register/login form and after inputting something into the search bar didn't work, which defied user's expectations, so we fixed that. Some users didn't know how to change their status, since their was no "Update Status" button and hitting enter after editing your status to change it wasn't obvious.

Our initial Create Event page didn't make it obvious how to the input the time, whether it was asking for hours and minutes or start time and end time. Now, when the user clicks on the date or time fields, a dialog comes up to reduce the risk of errors while inputting a time. Also, to create the event, we originally had a "Send Invites" button, but that didn't make sense for events with no invitees, so we changed that to say "Create Event". Users could not decline invitations in our first prototype, and users let us know that they would definitely like that option. The "Griddle" in the top bar wasn't originally a link back to the home page, making it impossible to go back to the home page without hitting the back button, which was a huge mistake. There was also, no way of seeing that you had new invitations with our original prototype, so we added a counter of new invites listed next to the Invites link.

Users were also confused about what the search bar actually searched for, so we added a placeholder that let users know they could search for friends or events with the search bar. We didn't make it obvious how to input invitees on the Create Event page, which we also wanted to change. We couldn't implement an autocomplete feature, so we now tell users to use commas to separate their invitee names.

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Open Issues and More Things to Address

We really wanted the calendar on the user's homepage to be interactive, so the user could easily create events on the calendar by dragging a time slot on their calendar to determine an event's start time and end time. A dialog box would then appear asking for the event's name and invitees. That was supposed to be one of our main features, but the API we tried using to build it wouldn't let us hack it enough to add an invitees field. Since we didn't want something that didn't work on our prototype's homepage, we decided to scratch it and just put a png of the user's schedule on the home page instead.

We also created the pages as static HTML, with no backend powering the site. The next thing we would do is create the backend so the user's calendar, events, invites, and friends can be loaded dynamically. Since this was still just the updated prototype and not the final product, we didn't feel it was necessary, but we could not have have a final product without it. We also didn't allow the user to update their profile picture or change their privacy settings, which we would also add to the final product. If we could figure out a way to integrate with Google Calendar, we would build that function into our product so the user's events created in Griddle will show up in the Google Calendar.