CS476 - User Interface Design
Dr. Yolanda Reimer
Semester Project
September - December 2006
Notepack is an application that assists students with taking notes and organizing them. As this was a course in User Interface, the application was designed with principles of User Centered Design. This type of interface design revolves around the user and making sure that their input and feedback is incorporated into the overall design. User feedback was acquired through interviews and usability testing. Eight students contributed to the design process.
The Notepack application allows users to organize their information by course. Each course has its own tab in the application, and these tabs contain subtabs for notes, assignments, research materials and course files. Basic formatting options for entering notes are available and users can organize their notes by section headers or by date entered. On the research tab, users can specify what sources are used in which papers and automatically generate a bibliography based on this information.
For a much more in-depth overview of the project and the design process, see the Project Website.
Other Team Member- Kenji Kobayashi
- Maintains a list of the student's courses, with tabs for each course
- Allows users to enter and organize notes for a course
- Keeps track of assignments and due dates
- Organizes research materials for course papers
- Stores course related files
- Written in C# using the .NET environment
- Heavy use made of Visual Studio's form editor for user interface aspect
This project was beneficial for a number of reasons. By going through the User Centered Design process, I gained insight as to aspects of the application that were obvious to me, but not obvious to the users. I also had a few situations where users found or used features that I had not thought of, or used the application in a novel and unexpected way. All teams in the course were designing note-taking applications as well, however, the range of ideas and different approaches to the problem were very interesting and useful. The people that we interviewed for the project were very helpful and offered insightful and meaningful feedback, which contributed greatly to the success of the project.