Blasted Back to the Stone Ages.

My apologies for the lack of updates lately. Just when I was about to ease into the weekly update interval, something terrible happened.

I remember I was 50 words or so into a new blog entry detailing my thoughts about our second demo. Before I could get to the part about how I managed to “gently persuade” 11 people into posing for the pictures, my screen froze. A reboot and a cup of hot chocolate later, I diagnosed my hard drive to be dead. Even though I didn’t lose too much data (huzzah for backups + svn) and Lenovo’s warranty covered everything else, I still grieved over the loss of utility time and the eventual re-installation/reconfiguration of a load of software. I was feeling very unmotivated and hence I did not finish the blog post. Boo.

Fortunately, these past two weeks did not require too much coding work. I have been using my dinky Asus EEE to tie me over until Lenovo ships me a new hard drive. For fun, I installed Eclipse on it and discovered that I needed to scroll to complete the five lines necessary to print out “Hello World”. I don’t want to imagine what Flex development would look like on it.

The next step in our project is to come up with a design for the SQL query building interface. We will be expanding on the boxes and lines concept. The approach is to let users who are unfamiliar with SQL and databases to be able to build meaningful SQL queries by simply dragging and dropping boxes and connecting them together. The design we came up with was heavily graphical, verbose, and inefficient, but it might just do the trick at allowing our target audience to take baby steps towards building their desired query. Of course, being computer scientists, we cannot trust our own judgment at determining the usability of this design because our needs are polar opposites of our target audience’s. Hence, before we invest any more time in over-engineering features that probably won’t be utilized, Greg and Diane suggested that we get our hands dirty and get a paper prototype going and run some tests on our end-users.

For the last couple of days, Bing and I have been uncharacteristically doing arts and crafts in our office. Thanks to a little help (errr… a lot of help) from our arts and crafts consultants Victoria and Eva, we were able to complete a sparkly prototype by end-of-day yesterday. Before people left for the day, we were able to capture Qi and “gently persuaded” him to try out our prototype. We were surprised at the amount of user insights we can extract from testing with a paper prototype. Perhaps more surprisingly, Qi was able to piece together all four of our test queries quite quickly. We were expecting users to not be able to complete the last query since it required a non-obvious step if it was to be expressed in SQL. Qi was able to build the query by reasoning it out using our prototype’s interface. While it is tempting to conclude that we have created something truly magnificent, we choose to postpone the celebrations. This is because even though Qi did not have any experience with SQL and databases, he is still a computer science student so his brain may be too in-synced with ours. We will have to wait until Monday to get a true assessment of the prototype’s usability when we try it out with two non-technical CS department faculty members.

Let’s hope my new hard drive arrives soon. The combination of the lack of a full-featured laptop and the arts & crafts may soon be enough to drive me to find even more alternative ways to do activities that I used to do with a computer, like… errr… *gasp* read a book in non-pdf format? Whoa.

Godspeed little hard drive, godspeed.