UH Connected
Overview
This application was created as a software project for ICS 464, a human-computer interaction class at UHM. UH Connected is a web application designed to help students at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa seek out faculty members to mentor them in the completion of their thesis or personal project while also serving as a resource for faculty members to actively seek out students to assist them in their research or application-based projects.
The application can be viewed here: UH Connected
This application includes:
- Signup page: includes option to state as student or faculty, and then fill out a form.
- About page (admin and user): a page where details about the functionality of the application is described in detail.
- All Projects page (admin and user): a page with published projects by faculty members. The student is able to learn more about the project and faculty member by clicking “Learn More”.
- All Profiles page (admin and user): a page with published profiles by faculty members ans students. The user is able to learn more about the person by clicking “Learn More”.
Development Process
I contributed to the project through various means in front-end design and back-end development. I helped with the overall UI design and look of the pages, along with contributing to the All Projects page, the “Learn More” functionality, and the project documentation.
My group learned over the course of the iterative design process how to develop a project proposal and requirements for the project, effectively utilize multiple prototypes and evolve a final application from them, and evaluate an application’s usability from the perspective of users. The various heuristic evaluations and usability testing helped us understand human-computer interaction in order to effectively develop and improve our prototype.
Design Decisions
There was a focus on the end-user as a way of deciding the important design decisions. We wanted to create an application that was both functional and user-friendly to ensure that we were providing a positive user experience. With that in mind, we decided on a color scheme that would be familiar to our intended user base of UHM community members, self-explanatory labels for pages and features like buttons, and simplistic processes to complete the standard task of connecting users. Other important design decisions that we made during implementation were which features to focus on and try to successfully implement, leaving other desired features that we had intended to include to be left by the wayside, based on our time constraints.
Contact Us
This was a group project managed by the following members: Aaron Nonaka, Joshua Paino, Christine Uehara, Maegan Chow, and Kiran Datwani (myself). To learn more about this project, please visit our GitHub repository: