Creating a User-Friendly Personal Wine Collection Inventory Management System

This project set out to create a user-friendly wine collection management software. Existing systems were reviewed and discussions with collectors took place to establish the user requirements for this type of inventory management system. This led to the scope of the project being narrowed to making a wine bottle entry form that was quick and easy to use. The programming language, Ruby on Rails, was used to design this system, and learning the software was a large part of the project itself. It was established that four forms would be designed using combinations of two ergonomic factors: an “F” shaped layout and the use of autocomplete text boxes. Two “F” shaped forms were developed: one with autocomplete and one without autocomplete. The other two forms had a simple vertical text box format: one had autocomplete, and the other did not. A one-way ANOVA followed up by a Fisher comparison test revealed that the form with no “F” shape and no autocomplete had the lowest mean entry time. These results were surprising because the altered layout and autofilling text boxes were expected to improve the users experience. An analysis of the unexpected results was conducted, but the data still allowed for a conclusion on which form was the most user-friendly. Also, the results could apply to other systems besides just a wine bottle entry form because the experiment focused on form-filling ergonomics

Design requirements for an online data exchange platform to bridge the gap between farmers and researchers in India

The rising awareness of information transparency and the increasing trend of citizen participation in the agriculture sector has created new opportunities for information sharing. There are numerous information resources available for farmers from private, government sources and industry stakeholders. There are also various farm surveys by which farmers contribute towards the agricultural sector. However, no such platform connects farmers and researchers in which data exchange happens simultaneously between them. This gap in information exchange contributes to slow growth in the advancement of the agricultural sector. Research results do not reach the end-users in time to adopt agricultural improvement practices. Often researchers do not get the opportunity to engage and encourage farmers to be citizen scientists to contribute to the research. In this thesis, we develop design requirements for an online web-based prototype data exchange platform to bridge the gap between researchers and farmers. The platform can serve as a way to build farmers’ trust in researchers and encourage them to contribute more towards agricultural research to develop the sector. We believe that the findings of this study will prove helpful to interface designers and researchers to inform and guide future work in this critical area