Presentation Rehearsal

As I announced yesterday, we had our final presentation for Calexico in front of all the other Software Engineering groups, the professor and his assistant.

But first, we started by rehearsing it all in the morning. The feeling I got there was a rather weird one. We still had loads of bugs and the interface was, apart from the parts that I did, disastrous in terms of usability. Even-though there was no specific focus on usability, I kind of made it my responsibility considering my passion for it. After fixing some bugs in the morning and exercising in giving the demo, we were semi-prepared for the presentation.

Third Group (SE3)

Of the three groups, we were the first to present our work. The presentation went ok, apart from some minor bugs that showed up and the occasional graphical glitches. The overall comments from the other groups were that the interface was nice and that there were a decent amount of functions effectively implemented. However, I did notice a periodic raised eyebrow at some of the parts of the GUI, especially the addition of recurring events where the GUI elements were perceived as a bit messy.

You can find more information about our project in the previous post.

Group Photo

Second Group (SE2)

Their presentation started off very promising. They delivered about 95% of the requested features and every feature was accompanied with decent GUIs. Once the demo started I was immediately disappointed in the GUI, which was far from complete, user-friendly or simple. It was  basically a three column site with textual commands in the right column and simple forms in the middle one. Their best argument for this was that their project is completely compatible with Lynx, which is a browser with a marginal market share but it is accessible for blind people and through the console, although during the demo with lynx, the calendar was pretty much unreadable. If this project ever wants a decent launch it definitely needs a new and complete GUI.

You can find more information about this project here.

First Group (SE1)

The third group started of with a bit of overhead. They talked about used tools for about 20 minutes, which was already mentioned twice in previous presentations. When they went to the demo, I was happy that the interface was a lot better than the previous group, although it still looked like an amateur blog. The biggest drawback was that the calendar didn’t contain any graphical calendar. Events were just rows of plain text sorted according to date. It is possible though to view a real calendar, but that is just a bit too much effort for the regular user. In short, there were loads of things that were absolutely wrong about the interface, but the underlying structure and functionality was there.

You can find more information about this project here.

As I have noticed over again, GUI and user experience are perpetually ignored and put to the background, which at the end is a pity because to me, and most end users, this is just what makes us use and buy the software.

In a couple of weeks I have an oral exam for this project on which I will have to reflect on the experience, after which I will post an article about it.

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