Improving the Indico Framework at the European Organization for Nuclear Research - Internship Report - LEIC 2006/2007 (FEUP)

This document describes the work developed by José Pedro Macedo Alves Ferreira, Informatics Engineering and Computing (LEIC) undergraduate student at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Porto (FEUP), in the context of the project "Improving the Indico Framework". The project took place at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in the framework of both the Technical Student Program of this organization, and the curricular internship of the aforementioned degree. The contents of this report refer to the internship period, the first half of the one-year Technical Student program. The project aimed to introduce usability improvements into an already existing web application, the Indico platform, a integrated system for event scheduling and management, which was initially developed as a European project and continued by CERN, being currently used by several institutions worldwide. Indico presented some usability issues that for long had been noticed by the users and required correction, mainly problems in the navigation process (event browsing), and the lack of user-centered features (i.e. a "personal area"). Initially, a thorough usability study was put in motion, including not only "checklist-based" analysis but "user-centered" approaches as well. A user survey and a laboratory test were conducted, and their results evaluated and taken into account in the definition of recommendations and requirements. Th e requirements whose priority was higher were selected, and functional prototypes were designed and implemented. This included an integrated search feature, a "favorite users" system, a personal area, and a contextual help system. The result of the project was a set of prototypes, compliant with the previously defined recommendations, and ready to be included in the production version of Indico. The objectives were accomplished, and the project entered a new phase, in which the user interface will be totally refurbished, in order to comply with the established requirements, and the developed prototypes will be introduced as normal features, available to the regular user.