Scenario Web Site Design:

Introduction:

For the last two months I have been working with Colin Potts and Reggie Hobbs. Colin is a professor at Ga Tech and is now working with schematic scenarios to understand users needs. Scenarios are narrative descriptions of interactions between users and proposed systems. These scenarios help both user and designer in the understanding of the functionality of the system being looked at. For the project, Colin would like to take the narrative description and find a way to present it on a web site. At this time, scenarios on a web site are on a document that you scroll through on one page. We would like to design a site were a scenario can be represented in a way that could be understund by all that look at it. So I am working on a way to present the information on a web site. Once I have finished, I will then work to try and write a program that will translate from SCML to HTML.

Reason for Project:

When I first arrived here for the program I wanted to work with Software Engineering or Graphics. After talking to Colin and Reggie and listen to the presentations I decided to work with Software Engineering. I have also been very interested in working with HTML because when in school I had to set up my own page and have always wanted to learn more. Again I talked to Colin and he told me that it would be nice to have a way to see the scenarios on the web so I jumped at the chance.

Solution:

To solve this problem I had to learn a little more about Colin’s work. I read two articles that Colin either wrote or helped to write about Scenarios. The first article was "Using Schematic Scenarios to Understand User Needs" by Colin Potts. In the reading he talks about what a scenario is, why it is used, and how it is set up. The second article was "Inquiry-Based Requirements Analysis" by Colin Potts, Kenji Takahashi, and Annie Anton. Again this article explained some of the requirements needed by the designer and then how that information is used to create the scenario.

My next step was to look at ways to present the information for the scenarios on a web site. I had to sit down and wrote out some ideas for what I thought might be a good layout to use. Colin then gave me three books on HTML and one on Java. So I took my ideas and sit down with these books to see if some of the ideas I had come up with could be done. My main idea was to use framing to show the scenario and the other was to use a slide show web page.

After reading some of the books that Colin gave me I came up with two examples to show Colin. I was not sure what he wanted exactly so I just try a few ways using framing. The follow ing are the two examples I came up with for framing:

Example 1 and Example 2

To do these two examples was not very hard but since this was my first time using frames it took a little time to get it to work the way I wanted it. Since I was using targets to make the main frame go to the section that you want from the index frame I had to decide how to do that as well. But overall to us frames was not a hard process at all.

I also did an example with a slide show type presentation. I was a little hard to get that one done and it is hard to read. So I decided not to use that one. You can see that example by clicking here.

Now that I have two ways that scenarios can be shown on the web I will try and write a program that will translate from SCML to HTML. I am not sure what SCML stands for but I am going to find out soon but I take it to be like HTML. In order to write this program Colin wanted it to be in SED or AWK. So Colin gave me another book to read called sed & awk by Dale Dougherty. Sed and awk are Unix based languages and use expression recognition to find and replace things. I read some of the book and I tried the sed & awk languages. I decided try both so using test files of regular text format to see if I could get sed or awk script files to work. While testing I did a very good job of understanding both of these languages so the testing went very well. In the end I decided that sed would be the one that I would use to write the script file that would translate the SCML file. So I then started to see if I could get a small script program to work on translating SCML to HTML. I was very happy to be able to say that the script program I wrote for the translation worked. If you would like to see the SCML original file click here to see the SCML. Here is the Sed script that was used to preform the translation on the SCML file. And here is the end result
IT WORKS

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Conclusion:

Over the last two months, I have learned a lot. I am glad to say that yes that my work was very successful. Colin has told me that the work I have done will be looked at by him and refined at some time. He plans to use some of the things I have done to finish creating a web site for scenarios that people can use and understand very easily. Future work includes refining the web layout and writing a better script file that will work on all the different kinds of SCML files. Because not all of the SCML file have the exact same layout. Again I have learned a lot about HTML and will do more work in this area. I would like to thank Colin Potts and Reggie Hobbs for everything that they have done. I learned a lot from them and they helped me very much and I would love to work with them again.