UHM-Connected
The UHM-Connected project is a web application for ICS 464 by me, Maegan Chow, Kiran Datwani, Aaron Nonaka, and Christine Uehara. This application is designed for students and faculty to easily connect with one another to establish research internships and collaborative projects. Our motivations for developing this app is in due to how that there are not many easily accessible resources to view all research opportunities on campus and this is further elevated due to distance learning. Opportunities outside of class are highly valued when applying to jobs, hence the goal is to simplify the process of discovering such opportunities. Other established projects exist such as RadGrad but our project aimed to target all members of the UH: Manoa, not just the ICS department.
While developing this application, we placed strong emphasis on ideas related to Human-computer interaction. These ideas include identifying requirements for the app, drafting storyboards on the different users and how they might interact with the app as well as gathering appropriate user feedbacks. Finding appropriate users was somewhat of a challenge given the 6-week duration of the course as well as the online learning format, but we were able to succeed in gathering what users would want in the app and their potential interactions that would eventually be the primarily influence of our design decisions when developing the app.
In regards to the development of the app, my role was primarily in regards to front-end work, specifically that of designing certain web pages (ex. the about page) and making sure various functionalities work such as making sure the proper data is displayed based on what is presented in the created collections. However, while we had plans to implement features like search filtering in response to user feedback, in the end we were unable to fully implement due to time constraints as a result of the course being fast-paced summer course. Despite some planned features being shelved, we were ultimately satisfied in the work and the knowledge we gained regarding the concepts of Human-computer interaction within the development of user applications.
Click here to explore a deployed version of our web application.