Interactive Prototype v1

Greetings to you, the lucky evaluators of the portal project, from Team Betamax! We shake you warmly by the hand! Tremendous things are in store for you! Many wonderful surprises await you! For now, we do invite you to come to our website here and be our guests for four hours or so — you and all others who are lucky enough to find this on the website. You will conduct yourselves around the portals yourselves, showing yourself everything that there is to see, and afterwards, when it is time to leave, you will be escorted home by a procession of large trucks. These trucks, I can promise you, will be loaded with enough delicious internets to last you and your entire household for many years. If, at any time thereafter, you should run out of internets, you have only to come back to the website and show this interaction script, and we shall be happy to refill your computer with whatever you want using a series of tubes. In this way, you will be able to keep yourself supplied with tasty internets for the rest of your life. But this is by no means the most exciting thing that will happen on the day of your visit. We are preparing other surprises that are even more marvelous and more fantastic for you and for all our beloved interaction script holders — mystic and marvelous surprises that will entrance, delight, intrigue, astonish, and perplex you beyond measure. In your wildest dreams you could not imagine that such things could happen to you! Just wait and see! And now, here are your instructions: the day that has been chosen for the evaluation conference is the ninth day in the month of November. On this day, and on no other, you must come to the evaluation conference at three-thirty o'clock sharp in the afternoon. Don't be late! And you are allowed to bring with you either one or two members of your own family to look after you and to ensure that you don't get into mischief. One more thing — be certain to have this interaction script with you, otherwise you will not be admitted.

--Willy WonkaTeam Betamax.

Seriously, though, there are quite a few things we’d like for you to check out and keep in mind when you visit the portal.

Link to Prototype v1

  • The most important aspect of our portal is the ability to add new, personalized content to the website without having to navigate through many pages. We’ve focused our efforts on two cases: one where an RSS feed is available, and one where there is not an RSS feed. Please test through both of these cases. For the RSS feed case, use http://www.cnn.com/, and for the non-RSS case, use http://hfid.olin.edu/.
  • We’d also like you to walk through the steps of just adding a bookmark. Again, please use http://hfid.olin.edu/, as this is the only thing we’ve set up for right now.
  • A particular interaction we’ve implemented since our user interview sessions is re-adding closed boxes. Close some, and evaluate the process to re-add these boxes back.
  • Find Haley Jacobs' phone number.
Notes:
  • You cannot log out of the system.
  • Web searching is non-functional
  • Please click on the buttons during the evaluation. The Enter/Return key has been known to cause problems.
  • Editing the weather box is also non-functional, as there is no weather backend to speak of.

If you have any questions, let us know.

Thanks!

Team Betamax -- Joe College, Doug Ellwanger, JJ Freeman, and Jon Tse