Likhitha Chintareddy’s Status Report 04/08

This week, I worked on updating the UI and am reworking the AJAX portion of the web app. I made slight changes to the design of the barometer on the Javascript end so that it should render differently when functioning i.e. the colors fill up rather than the needle moving. In other words, it isn’t a barometric “needle” anymore but just a barometric representation. The rewritten AJAX portion is to reflect the change in the database representation. I’ve been learning more about SQL queries as it’s not a part I’m comfortable with. The upcoming week, we will integrate the systems and I will finish writing and testing the AJAX portion of the webapp.

For testing purposes, our main criteria wrt to the web app is that the application update information every 2 seconds and ease of user experience. I’m exploring the platform Pingdom for verifying web app update time – it has a 30 day free trial so it’s cost effective too. If it ends up not suiting our needs, we will pursue manual testing instead where I compare screenshots before and after every update according to the console on the browser. As for the ease of user experience, I will conduct in-person usability tests choosing some students as users and observing users as they perform tasks on the web app, and also cognitive walkthroughs where users recite their thoughtprocess out loud as they use the web app