Scenario 1 -- John works as a project manager in a company. He is new to the KM domain and wants to find some general information on KM. [annotated storyboard]
Scenario 2 -- Mary is a graduate student in the Business school, working on a class project related to KM, particularly a branch of KM called intellectual property. She wants to search for more information about this subject. [annotated storyboard]
Scenario 3 -- Susan works as an information manager in a company. Her boss asked her to study and evaluate different products to create an enterprise KM system. on the options and issues of developing KM systems. She needs to find information on the existing systems and the companies who developed them. [annotated storyboard]
Storyboards
of the 3 scenarios
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Results1 Results2 Enhancement (on the fly) |
Rather than write high quality content for some pages and no content
for others, mediocre content was written for all pages. In the proceeding
days, the compilation of information on the pages will be filtered, organized
better, or rewritten. We recognized this as a trade off but at least
with some information on all the pages, prototyping testing will be more
realistic. This addresses the difficulty we had in the low-fi prototyping
test where the "wizard" had to tell the user what she would see if content
had been written. Telling users what they would see is less consistent
than having at least a little bit available.
Dreamweaver was used as the predominant WYSIWYG web design tool. It worked fairly well for most of the tasks needed to construct web pages. Its ability to create image maps within the application was the most useful feature of all. It was simple to use and quick. Without such a WYSIWYG tool the total amount of time to complete the task would have easily tripled. None of the fancy features helped us decide which layout would be the most user-friendly. This creative process occurred completely in the minds of our group member's minds and from user testing. Dreamweaver only helped us instantiate our ideas faster than if we had to code it by hand. Dreamweaver demonstrated difficulty in performing some operations like creating / modifying complex tables (tables within tables) and creating /setting anchors. Consideration was given to using Frontpage for more complex tables but the application's interoperability problem defeated that idea. Instead, Amazon.com's site was edited and used as the basis for Gotcha's pages. This eliminated the need to create our pages from scratch. Netscape Page Composer was used to compensate for Dreamweaver's weakness in creating / setting anchors because it has a more intuitive procedure for creating and setting anchors.
Adobe Photoshop was used as the exclusive graphic design program. Photoshop was used to create the GIFs that serve as the image maps at the top of each page (tab folder image) and any image maps appearing in the left hand column of most pages (navigation feature to the children of topmost pages). Six separate tab folder images were created because the visible page has its tab highlighted in blue whereas the non-visible pages have their tabs in yellow. Even though Photoshop provided a great deal of flexibility in moving portions of the images around and changing font and image colors, it didn't provide a guide on how to choose colors. That decision was left completely to the group's discretion. This could be disastrous to people with no sense of coordination. The one feature that was invaluable was the text edit feature introduced in version 4.0 enabling users to edit text layers separately. This is a valuable time saver given the previous version required users to delete the text layer and create a brand new one even if the change was something as simple as changing the spelling. Photoshop is a complicated application to grasp and use, but no better alternative exists. It doesn't show how big (e.g. KB) an image is within the context of the application. A user must open the directory in a separate window and check. This is very distracting if a user wants to compare image sizes based on formats. Modifying images is also a time-intensive and tedious task. After changing the total number of tabs from five to six, all five images were changed after hours of work. Despite the availability of macros, the detail-oriented nature of the work couldn't take advantage of macros to speed the process. The other main difficulty was Photoshop's inability to support the drawing of circular or elliptical figures. This required us to modify pre-existing images instead of creating our own.
Perl was used to create the cgi scripts to implement search.
Perl is a language for easily manipulating text, files, and processes.
It provides a simple and fairly readable way to do jobs. Perl was used
to parse the user search query, identify the phrases. If the user chooses
to enhance the query, then the program matches the terms/phrases against
the Gotcha thesaurus, and a query enhancement form is created and returned
to the user. The form allows the user to choose any term/phrase they want
to include in the enhanced query. Then the submitted enhanced query will
be processed and the program will use the enhanced query to conduct the
search. Otherwise, the original query will be used. The program then does
an inhouse search and/or passes the query along to other search engines.
All the results will be processed, merged and presented to the user. The
problem with this programming language is that it is quite easy to introduce
bugs, and quite time-consuming to fix all the bugs. Also, it takes more
processing time than languages such as C and C++.