I worked in a team of four on this project, and functioned as our team leader. The vector DGA project was largely a debugging and redesign project. The main goal of this was to present the client with a use-able project that he could demonstrate to the companies which he was selling the product to. There had be several previous attempts at creating the product, but none had offered the level of quality in terms of stability and user interface that the client needed.

We were happy to present the client with a fully functional, stable program that eliminated the confusion of the previous user interface. We replaced it with an intuitive wizard based design that was "Childishly Simple" to use. Through extensive testing and good use of error handlers, we were able to eliminate run-time errors. We added a reporting function that allowed the diagnostic data to be presented as a report, either in printed form, or exported as html. The new user interface drew its data from the existing company database, so that an end user, could never make a choice that didn't exist. By eliminating ALL of the wrong choices, the user had little opportunity to be confused or frustrated. We made heavy use of visual cues in this project, to guide the user through the process. There was contextually relevant help to explain the process to the end user, and an ever present set of navigation buttons that would individually disappear when they weren't appropriate. In addition to these, we presented the end user with a graphical progress indicator that highlighted the step they were working on, coloring the steps that had been completed, and revealing the following steps. It was VERY nice.

We learned how to meet a client's requirements, while not killing the team in the process (though we each put in some 35 hour weeks on this project over the course of the term. (20hrs per person per week was average). In the end we were very proud of what we had provided, given some of the unexpected things that come up during the course of a project including a change of the client's database...

Conclusion (Vector)