Final Report

Systems 323

December 5, 2001

Prepared by:

Christy Barnett

Bob Etris

Rob Janiczek

Jason Kearns

Dustin Marks

Carolyn Quil

Table of Contents

I. CollegeQuest – Planning

Project Goals………………………………………………………………………1

Target User Population...………………………………………………………….1

Intended Functionality.……….……………..………………………...…………..2

Market Assessment Efforts……………..…………………………………………3

II. CollegeQuest - Implementation

Product Description…………..……………………………………..…………….4

Interface Design…………………………………………………………………...5

Usability Test Design and Results……….………………………………………..7

III. Further Discussion

Maintainability…………………………………………………………………...11

Future Developments….…………………………………………………………12

Appendix A: Screen Shots – Market Survey………………………………………... A-1

Appendix B: Screen Shots – CollegeQuest………………………….…...………...... B-1

Appendix C: Testing Instructions………………………………………..….……..…C-1

Appendix D: Questions/Discussions……………………..………………………..…D-1

Appendix E: Network Interaction Model………………….…………………..…..…E-1

Appendix F: Design Space Analysis…………………………….………………..….F-1

Appendix G: CollegeQuest Walk-Through………………………………….…….…G-1

CollegeQuest - Planning

Project Goals______

Our group originally started with a broad idea of using a college search engine to give the user an optimally planned path along which they could visit schools of their choice. Further development of this idea led to the following goals:

  • Provide users with a convenient, easy-to-use product with which they could plan tours of multiple colleges
  • Produce an attractive, well designed website
  • Create a product offering enough functionality to ensure its success without adding unnecessary options that may detract from the site’s main focus

Further, less explicit goals included completing the product on time and maintaining an even work distribution among group members.

Target User Population

CollegeQuest’s original primary user population was juniors and seniors in high school. However, after some thought it seems more intuitive that the parents would play a large role in planning their children's college tours. Hence, an effective product would provide an interface functionally appealing and appropriate for both. The user population also includes guidance counselors and other individuals who assist these students in the college selection process.

Intended Functionality______

CollegeQuest serves two main purposes. The first is generating a shortest path itinerary to visit colleges selected or inputted by the user. The tool searches a database to arrange the optimal trip route, therefore minimizing travel time and eliminating backtracking. Also, the tool searches available tour times at each school. This itinerary provides the user with a daily schedule, consisting of tour times, visiting information, and a profile of each school, as well as driving directions and maps. All of these features would vastly reduce planning time by combining all the necessary resources into one website.

The second purpose is allowing the user to search for colleges if they have not already done so. The site offers a wide variety of search criteria including school type, majors offered, size of school, cost, geographic location, and average SAT and GPA range (see screen shots in Appendix B for detailed layout). It then generates results that match their criteria and provides brief facts for each school in tabular form and a link to a more detailed college profile. After a user has browsed this information, they can select which schools they desire to visit and plan a tour. Also, the tour planner may generate schools along the route that may also interest the user.

Additionally, CollegeQuest offers a member sign-in area. This allows both frequent and first-time users to save multiple itineraries, saving the effort of having to re-compile the trip schedule. The sign-in area also allows the user to change their password, their username, and displays an error message if an incorrect password is entered. If the user has forgotten their password, it can be sent to them through a secure e-mail connection.

Market Assessment Efforts_____

Before beginning product development, a rudimentary level of task analysis was necessary to get a better feel for what functionality users would desire in this sort of product. Therefore, our group decided to post a survey online, and distribute it to a number of high school seniors. Screenshots of this web page and sample questions appear below in Appendix A of the report.

A total of 14 individuals responded to the survey, ten females, and four males. Eight thought they might be inclined to pay for the type of service CollegeQuest offers, while six did not. As a whole, they appear to use a variety of materials to assist them in their search, relatively equally distributed among guidance counselors, on-line materials, books, and relatives/friends. Forty two percent voted their biggest determining factor in choosing a college to be type of majors offered, chosen over such other choices as reputation, cost, enrollment, and geographic location. Finally, the feature voted “most useful” in a website designed to assist the selection process was general information on each college (23.53%), with a “list of additional schools that may be of interest” coming second (19.61%) and both a general search engine and information on tour dates each garnering fifteen percent of the vote.

CollegeQuest - Implementation

Product Description _____

CollegeQuest is a web-based college tour-planning tool. There are two basic functions as outlined in the Intended Functionality section of the report. When the user chooses the Tour Planner button, they input their starting point (address information), followed by the schools they wish to visit and the dates for they desire to travel. Though initially only up to five schools can be accepted, clicking the “I want to visit more than five schools” link doubles the capacity to ten. CollegeQuest, in turn, outputs a trip itinerary connecting the various tour destinations by the shortest route possible. This College Visit Itinerary page also offers a map with both the route and various stops highlighted. In the daily agenda, the user can access hotels and restaurants in the area, learn more in-depth visitor information, and view a college profile for each of the schools on the route. If the user finds the single map at the top of the itinerary page insufficient, they can click “View Detailed Driving Directions” to see step-by-step directions between each destination point with a map of each section of the route. Also, it provides a printable format that the user can print out and take along with them on their trip. Additionally, if the user forgot to input one of the schools they wanted to visit, they can click on “Modify this Itinerary” to add it to the route and regenerate their trip plan (see Appendix B for screen shot). The user can then save these itineraries if they are a member for later viewing and modification.

If the user arrives at CollegeQuest and does not know which schools interest them, they can choose the College Search button. At the College Search page, the user can enter a variety of search criteria with which CollegeQuest returns all the colleges fitting the user's preferences. This criteria includes type of school (public or private), majors offered, size and cost range, geographic location (region or state), and SAT and GPA range. The Search Results page returns, in tabular format, quick facts about the colleges meeting the search criteria, as well as links (College Profile) to additional information on the schools. From this point, the user can either click “Plan My Tour” to go to the Tour Planner page (after selecting schools they desire to visit from the list), or click “Change My Search Criteria” if they would so desire. The search criterion appears above this button to provide the user immediate feedback and prevent problems with the gulf of evaluation.

The member sign in area provides all the same features described above in the Intended Functionality section (see Appendix B for all screenshots of all CollegeQuest pages).

Interface Design

As with any good design, CollegeQuest attempts to exhibit an attractive user interface that maximizes utility to the user while minimizing confusion. The original color scheme of predominantly lime green on white background was discarded in lieu of a more attractive set of blue tones. Much of the unused white space appearing in the first generation prototype is now filled with pictures of college age students interacting on university campuses. The development team worked towards striking a balance between making it interesting enough to keep a graduating senior excited about going to visit schools, while keeping a professional, utilitarian feel for parents setting up these various college tours.

At first glance, CollegeQuest may appear to be a simple website. It has three basic options (Tour Planner, College Search, Sign In), but there is a lot more going on in secondary and tertiary layers offering the user additional functionality. For example, on the College Visit Itinerary page, the trip plan itself appears basic and straightforward (an intended design attribute). However, it offers hotel and restaurant links, along with visiting information including campus maps, admissions office contact information and general school statistics. On the surface, CollegeQuest is primarily a dedicated college tour planner service, while at the same time offering access to the type of information one might find at other college search websites. Additionally, the College Search option itself offers the user many customizable features. After matching colleges are returned from a search, the user can select those they desire to go visit and CollegeQuest enters them automatically into the Tour Planner page, which helps minimize the necessary amount of effort on the part of the user to complete their intended task. In general, CollegeQuest attempts to do the majority of the hefty processing work behind the scenes to ensure the user enjoys a pleasant trip planning experience.

One constant design feature is that the toolbar at the left of each page nested in the darker blue background (see appendix B for screenshot) remains on each page. We attempted to minimize navigation by implementing the Modify this Itinerary! and Change My Search Criteria! Buttons, which send the user back to their previous page. While the user remains on a particular page, the button appears to have disappeared leaving only text in its place, indicating that selecting that page no longer is an option as long as it is active. Also, the simple layout of the homepage offers users only the information and links to those features they need to start their college tours. The fading sign-in text just below the title bar increases salience, drawing attention to the user, but remains constant once in full view so as not to be a distraction. The toolbar buttons on the left of the screen are listed in the same order as their description and in-text links to the right, affording the user to assign a natural (intended) relationship between the two elements. Distracting elements such as moving .gif files or pop-up ads are left out.

In addition, the sign-in page gives the user feedback through each stage of the process. If the user enters an incorrect password, an error message appears. Once the login is successful, text just below the title-bar at the top of the screen welcomes them and provides a link to view their saved trip itineraries. A clearly marked “new user” registration page takes their necessary information and allows users to choose a username and password to generate a new account.

Usability Test Design and Results

Four usability tests were conducted on CollegeQuest using two sets of instructions. The first of these supplied the test subject with a set of two tasks to introduce the basic functional features of the website. These instructions appear in Appendix C of the report. These instructions asked the test subject to plan a trip to three different schools using the Tour Planner as well as find an available hotel and restaurant in the area. In the second task of the test, the test subject searched for a public or private university in the northeast, with size greater than 5000 and offering a pre-med major.

The questionnaire/comments, appearing in Appendix D, asked the test subject some general questions about the overall design and layout of the website. Two members of the CollegeQuest development team oversaw the testing of each test subject, taking notes as they completed the task sheet and questionnaire. At the end of each test, the team members and test subject exchanged ideas on their general impressions of the process and additional changes/editing necessary.

This usability testing stage of the development process brought to light a number of changes that the development team decided to implement. Some general suggestions included making more dynamic use of the white space. In order to achieve this balance, more images were added, particularly on the homepage. Some of the links such as that for the “sign-in” page and some additional functions on the itinerary page were not yet functional. Test subjects suggested implementing the member sign-in area at the bottom of the page and including a link for “first-time visitors,” affording new users access to an account. In the final design, the development team instead implemented options to both sign in (for current users) or to create a new account.

It was also suggested to eliminate the constant blue color on the outside of all pages, either by expanding the content on all the pages to take up more space or by removing it altogether. We left the blue color to account for resolution differences, however, in the true implementation, we could fill this space with advertisements. On the homepage, better alignment between the taskbar on the left and the corresponding description on the right would help to clarify that the descriptions match up with the buttons. In our implementation, we decided to expand the description of the website, and therefore this change was not necessary. Also, the colors of the in-text links needed to all match; those on the itinerary page had not as of yet matched those of the other pages.

There were also several suggestions for improvements on the itinerary page. The hotel and restaurant links on the itinerary page needed to be more salient. Possible solutions included changing the positioning, coloring, or size of the links. Additionally, when the subject clicked on a link there was no way to get back from the hotel and restaurant sites to our page. To solve this, the links now generate pop-up windows, allowing easier navigation between layers.

Many of the test subjects identified an unclear wording scheme within the College Visit Itinerary. For example, describing going to UVA as "Drive to Charlottesville" might leave some users wondering where they are going if they don't know where UVA is located. Subjects further suggested avoiding using abbreviations in order to maintain consistency and a professional appearance. From one test subject’s suggestion, we set borders around the itinerary, as well as a gray background for color contrast to make it more salient. The test subjects deemed the “quickest route” page and “1 more day route” links unnecessary; therefore we eliminated them. Finally, the map provided at the top of the page needs more options. Zoom functions would be particularly helpful, in order to optimize the user’s ability to view the detailed map. Due to time considerations, this will be a future implementation.

On the search page, one test subject noted that the map did not display individual state boundaries that could lead to confusion about which state belongs in each region (particularly with those states bordering two regions), therefore we changed the map so it now includes the state borders. There were also alignment problems caused by differing resolutions. In order to rectify this, the information on the page is aligned vertically instead of horizontally. The page also now clarifies which categories allow multiple selections. One final addition was to expand the functionality of the search engine by adding options such as SAT scores, tuition, grade point average, etc, which were all implemented by our team.

In conclusion, the test subjects seemed support the project concept and interface. The theme of the suggestions during the course of post-evaluation conversation seemed to be "make me want to use this more." The functionality is acceptable, considering the preliminary stages of the work, but the appearance could be improved. It needs to be more attractive without compromising functionality.

After making several of these changes, an additional, less formal usability test was performed. The test subjects included parents, a high school student, and a college student. The final changes were determined by the suggestions made in this process.

Further Discussion

Maintainability

CollegeQuest’s database will require continuous maintenance as new contact information becomes available, additional schools are added, and new features are implemented. At the bottom of the homepage, questions and comments are directed to the Webmaster’s mailing address. In this way, guidance counselors, college administrators, or anyone looking at CollegeQuest can offer new information or new ideas for improvement. A full staff of approximately ten to fifteen employees would run the day-to-day operations of the business. This includes database management technicians, programmers, website designers, hardware engineers, and customer relations (to recruit new schools to publish their information through CollegeQuest.