Keane Riley
Give Me G.A.S.
Give Me G.A.S. was a project I made for my HCDE 310 Interactive Systems Design and Technology implemented using Python, HTML, CSS, and Google App Engine. The assignment was to create an app that uses two APIs to manipulate data and produce useful output. My app idea arose from one of my favorite pastimes: looking at guitars I can't afford on the internet. I often found myself looking up a guitar's specs and price and then looking for YouTube vidoes of people playing or reviewing them. Inspired by this, I sought to combine the Reverb API (a site for buying and selling new or used guitars and other instruments) with YouTube's API into one mega window-shopping app.
I started this project by looking at what requirements were needed to provide basic funtionality for searching through listings. I dedided on a simple search bar with three addtional parameters: price minimum, price maximum, and an option to display only used instruments. *
After I implemented my search function, I had to choose how to display the results. As I mentioned, the purpose of my app was to essentially let me window shop guitars so I wanted to keep the results visually appealing; in the pursuit of this goal, I opted to display only pictures and price in the results. The pictures served to gain user's attention and allow them to browse quickly through the listings to see if anything caught there eye. The price was to allow users to easily see an estimate what kind of guitar they could expect for the amount of money it was being sold for.
Finally, I had to design the item display page. I knew I wanted a two column layout, one for the listing and the other for the videos. The listing body was displayed in the left column, including any pictures uploaded by the listings's owner. Videos are kept on the page as users scroll through the item description so they can watch while looking through the listing (the image presented here is an extended display). I also wanted users to have a few choices for videos and found that 4 YouTube players filled the space nicely.
*At this point in my studies, I had not taken any other usability classes; armed with the knowledge I now have, here is where I would have liked to do some requirements gathering to better understand user goals. As it was however, I was the only user in mind so these were my base requirements.