Project Summary Report
The project our team worked on was building a user interface for Health Records For Everyone's questionnaire editor. The goal of the project was to create a user interface for survey creators, so that less savvy users could interact with the question database in a more intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing, way.
I. HR4E: UI Overhaul
The primary goal of our project was to improve the aesthetics of the questionnaire editor. A secondary goal of our project was to create data that could be entered into the database. Another secondary goal of our project was to create a piece of software that could make use of the existing database.
We wanted an intuitive interface for survey creators. This meant designing a system which allows for visually representing the contents of a questionnaire in a given project. In the prior implementation, the user was presented with the information in a list format mirroring the internal structure within the database. We sought to abstract the presentation of the questionnaire, giving the user a more natural way to visualize the contents of the project. In doing so, we had to build an additional module in Django to integrate the UI with the database systems already in place.
Additionally, we implemented Bootstrap to add CSS to the system, creating a sleek, modern presentation to the system.
Live Test: http://hr4etest.herokuapp.com/ last update: 6/1/14 Please see README for test script instructions
Login Credentials: usr = hr4e pw = pw
- "Plug and Play" installation of our software
- Keeping our code decoupled from the old code base
- Responsive Design
- User Experience
To implement a sleek and dynamic UI, we chose to utilize Bootstrap and AngularJS frameworks, with a currently existing Django backend, to create our interface. The end result of these technologies would be an interactive form which would allow for a survey editor to log in, choose a project to work on, select a survey, and make top-level modifications to the survey with ease.
One of the challenges we encountered in working on this project was integrating our code with the existing codebase. Before we could go beyond the design phase, we had to gain a thorough understanding of the systems currently implemented. The existing codebase also placed restrictions on the technologies available for use. The most prominent example of this was the use of Django, which no one in our group had any experience with prior to this project.
Another issue that arose in the project was the level of integration necessary with the already existing backend. When we started the project, we operated under the assumption that our user interface would be fairly separated from the already existing server infrastructure. However, once we began writing the code, we realized that we needed to integrate the UI with the database in a fairly robust manner, with we were initially unprepared for.
We also encountered several miscellaneous bugs, most of which probably originate in having to combine several frameworks. For a list of active bugs, see https://github.com/hr4e/SurveyUI/issues
GitHub: https://github.com/hr4e/SurveyUI
Team Members:
- David Taylor
- Francisco Perez
- Graham Greving
- Mark Anthony Serrano
- Matthew Isaac Lean
- Rachelle Tanase
Team Mentors:
- Philip Strong
- Clinton Lewis
- Joe Rowley