UMD+Notes+Final+Report


 * __ UMD Notes Final Report __**

Our goal in this project was to provide University of Maryland students with a way to share notes easily. Several reasons why this service is needed include the following: missed classes, the need to review course content before signing up for the course, the need to go back and review the material with many users’ perspectives on the subject, or the need to just show off their pretty notes. Our site is designed to help students gain access to course materials in an easy and intuitive way.
 * The Problem:**

__Steven Banaszak:__ Designed the UMD Notes logo, provided the overall layout for many of the pages, formatted pages to make them more accessible, edited our submissions during each step, wrote the final report, created the powerpoint presentation for our final report, wrote the help page, designed the browse by class system.
 * Credits:**

__Daniel Choi:__ Created the idea for the website. Created the website design that was eventually used for the website. Integrated the search results functionality/presentation. Modified website to make features more visible. Modified website after usability studies to address common problems.

__Siwatm Piyasirisilp:__ Implemented the login system, browse by class system, notes preview system, notes upload system as well as the comments and rating system. Built the SQL tables holding the note data and integrated the site with DropBox and Google Docs Viewer, edited our submissions during each step.

Our audience is mainly University of Maryland undergraduates.
 * Audience:**

Most competitive solutions are made for any students at any school. This is a problem because it makes it much harder for students to find notes on their specific class at their specific school. Many of these sites also force students to pay for the notes, most of which don’t allow any sort of trial to see if the note is worth the money. Also, the note sharing sites that are free fail to provide much of a reason to upload notes. Our design is meant to reward those who upload their own notes and not force students to pay to view notes.
 * Competitive Solutions:**

Our main goal is to provide a free note-sharing website for Terps which rewards people for sharing their notes without a serious cost to those users who merely want to download notes. Being college students ourselves, we realize that money is often an issue; so forcing students to buy notes is definitely not the correct approach. The only problem with the non-commission system is that there becomes less of an incentive to upload your notes for a class. Our solution is a smart token system that allows users who upload notes to view and download more notes than guests who merely visit the site to view notes.
 * Our Solution:**

Of course not all notes are perfect. To help reduce the likelihood of notes providing false information or just badly written notes we allow users to rate and add comments to notes that they have viewed or downloaded. When viewing search results users can also sort the notes by rating or number of views to get notes that have been ‘proofed’ by more people. Also, we have provided a help page which answers many of the frequently asked questions voiced during our usability test.


 * Screen Shots**

Main Page

Search Results

Download Notes Page

Help Page

Browse Classes Page

Upload Notes Page

User Profile

User Profile With Help

Logout


 * Transition Diagram**

We have a help page filled with frequently asked questions that we got during the usability test, tutorials on how to do certain things, or clarifications on anything we felt may not have been described enough. We also added a "What's this?" link next to the tokens section of the user account page in order to teach users about our token system. We found that the token system wasn't immediately apparent to new users during our usability test.
 * Description of any assistance you gave to learners of the system**

Our usability study provided us with a large amount of useful feedback for improvements. We conducted this study on six University of Maryland Undergraduates with a wide range of majors, different amounts of internet usage per week, with a 50% split between males and females. The main problems we found were with the upload page, search results, and the lack of any real introduction to how the site works. Overall the users felt it was not hard to use but did not understand the token system and uploading was a pain. In our final prototype we fixed the search results page to have better positioned sorting arrows as well as a more user friendly ‘view notes’ feature where the user can click anywhere on the search result to view the note instead of just on the ‘view notes’ button. Also, we fixed the issue with constant page refreshes, which distracted many users. The notes upload page was also fixed so that it would not refresh the page when a note was being previewed (many users filled in the note information and then previewed the note only to find that it refreshed the page and erased everything they filled in). Lastly, we added a search bar, upload notes button, and help link to every page so that users could always search for notes, upload notes, or get help no matter where they were in the site.
 * Usability:**

We were not able to implement a way for users to annotate the documents that other users uploaded. Our only solution was to implement a comments box that ran along the side of the note that users could use to comment on the system. We also were not able to implement a system to limit the notes preview to 1 page. Our work around was to limit users to view only as many notes as they had tokens for, as well as any notes they uploaded themselves.
 * Open Issues:**