Research
We researched about Univeral Design and Universal Experience. We
learned that the best experience is delivered on a website through
a clear, visible and comprehendable webpage, regardless of the
user's ability, disability, age or size and other characteristics.
Surely, users would like to use a visually pleasing and
comprehensible product. We also learned that we need consistency
on our webpage. If huge differences are made between webpages, it
is not easily understandable and is probably frustrating for the
user. We think the most important aspect is that the user feels in
charge and comfortable.
Application of this universal design principles minimizes the need
for assistive technology.It creates products, systems, and
environments to be as usable as possible by as many people as
possible irrespective of external factors.
Response to the Brief
Our project was envisaged for users who would like to get a brief
outline of information of the European Union country that they
would like to visit. Therefore, our target audience are people who
like to travel frequently and would like to know quick information
like the capital city, the flight fare and the average hotel cost
in the journey. We came up with several ideas to begin with for
example ;
A restaurant website -- This idea was the first
proposed idea. We wanted to book an available time for a
particular day. The reservation could only be made for the next
day. We had also planned to give frequent customers a discount in
order to gain their loyalty. The users had to first create an
account, which would give them their unique ID. Upon visiting the
website, if their details and password were entered correcty, the
would be able to retrieve their ID and book a reservation.
However, when we were planning out the code, we discovered that we
had to cross-reference the time that the user had inputed with the
available times first before the user could book the reservation.
This was not possible because we had yet to learn how to do this.
We also had to open an account for several users. Our second table
would have to have the user's unique ID, (the relation), and the
third task was to link the tables and then count the number of
reservations a user had.
We thought that this was a mammoth task to do considering the time
frame and limited knowledge that we had. We eliminated this idea
as a result, with reluctance.
Travel wish list--We delved into the tourism
sector with this idea. We wanted the users to rank the top ten
countries on their bucket list. We would then display the
countries that the user wanted to visit that correalted with the
general public's opinion.
Albeit this idea seemed practical, we figured out that there was
nothing to relate to, which was one of the learning outcomes. The
only this that we could possible do was to store the data, and
cross-check it with the existing table of the public's opinion,
that too which we did not have an understanding of. As a result,
this idea was abandoned.
Travelling guide-- This is the idea we finally
settled on after much deliberation. We researched our ideas for
the first three days and only after that were we able to settle on
this project. We had initially decided to have a travel guide of
all the countries, but upon realising that we did not know how to
add external information into the database and that we had to type
out information on all 196 countries of the world, we narrowed it
down to the countries in the EU currently.
Final Artefact in Development
We were able to create a fully functional website that allows the
user to input any country in the EU and recieve the capital of the
country, how much the cheapest flight ticket costs and how much
the cheapest hotel costs per night. In order to do this we created
a relational Data base so that the client could recieve
information from the Server.
Client SideThe Client contains code that recieves
data from the data base containing the required outputs, as well
as the function of the button. When the button is clicked a
message displaying "Search Complete" is shown and the information
is shown below.
Server Side
The server creates the database object as well as queries the
database for the facts about the countries. Thes facts are stored
under the Values: countryID, country.country_name,
info.infoCapital, info.infoAmount, info.infoFact.
Our Development
We began by coming up with a variety of ideas to meet the task
before settling on one. Once we decided to create a travel
website, we broke up the team so Alex researched all the countries
and their relevant data for the database. Neha and Nayana began
working on the html. We had decided based on the UD/UX research
that we wanted minimal information on the page so it would be easy
to comprehend.Fatimah worked on the CSS.
Then Neha and Nayana began working on the javascript. We began
using a sample code as a foundation and moulding to the purpose of
our website. We ran into some difficulty with the client-side
java. We were unsure if we wanted our search to save into a table
in the database in order to retrieve information. However, we
decided we didn't and manipulated the code accordingly.
Our html requests the user to input the country they would like to
travel to. Our client side java, once the search button is clicked
calls the function getData to find relevant data from the database
for what country had been searched and displays the data on the
screen. Our server side java basically links the two tables in the
database so country and it's information will both be at the users
disposal.
Once our code was working, we began to feed in details into our
database. In our database, we had two tables. One had a list of
the 28 countries in the EU with it's corresponding primary key. We
had a second table called info. In this table we had information
about a country like it's capital, the price of a flight ticket
and the price of a hotel. This detail was linked to the country
table using the country primary key using the foreign key in the
sqlite and also in our server side java.
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