Please (provided you are behind the firewall and a staff member at NYPL) attempt to break this: q.nypl.org.
Based on several interviews and some user testing conducted by Michael Lascarides, Trevor Thornton put together a redesigned mockup of the first Labs Q Web application. Today, I finished implementing all the suggested changes, and now the site is ready for anyone and everyone to attack it and attempt to break it.
The purpose of the site is to allow NYPL Staff to request a project for digitization and then to have a place to track the project through its digitization lifecycle.
Changes include: a reworked main menu page, including a tab for projects related to your username; a reworked project details page with a tab for information relating to project items; and most importantly, an entirely reworked form for requesting and editing a project that unifies all the project’s attributes under one roof.
As always, this application has been developed in Ruby on Rails. Quick technical notes on this subject:
- The process of revising these forms, while generally painless, proved slightly challenging when combining forms for some of the project’s models.
- Using AJAX to add new models to the form is a little tricky, but entirely worth the effort. The trouble comes in naming the form fields in such a way that the multi-valued attributes of a project are successfully included in the parameters passed to the background methods without duplicating the names. Bit of trickery needed here, but I got it to work fine.
Please feel free to post any comments / questions / problems with the revised web application below.
