Friday, December 18, 2009

Greensmart v2.1

Our project, named Greensmart, is a webapp which displays simulated data of the electrical grid of Oahu, Hawaii. It provides a user useful information in a way that is easy to digest and gain something useful. We have two pages which give different data to the user: a stoplight page and a grid info page. The stoplight page presents the user with a stoplight with either the red, yellow, or green light lit up. This represents the current level of carbon emissions. The user is given an explanation of the data presented and a recommendation if it is a good time to be using energy. The grid info page is a page where the user can enter in data to get the information that they want displayed in a google chart. The user can choose from a source and the start and end date.

There were two big things that I gained from this project. The first one is working in a group. I had only once before worked in a group for programming. The methods that we used in class like Hudson and HackyStat were very helpful in giving me a taste of what I can expect a professional setting to use. The second thing I learned was about the user interface and creating an interface that would be user friendly. There was a big emphasis placed on making the webapp as user friendly as possible and I learned a lot about what things we can do or avoid to achieve that goal.

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