Web 2.0 School Software; Designing for Usability

Abstract

A school in Gothenburg has an old program for handling their data about students. They have requested new software to be developed in order to support their need of archiving, structuring and accessing information about e.g. class attendance, individuell utvecklingsplan (UIP), journals, grades etc. The new system should be available through the internet with a web interface i.e. no installation should be necessary in order to access the system from a new computer. The goal in this thesis is to design and implement the web 2.0 application that the school requested, in a MVC framework called Struts2, with emphasis on the interaction design of the system. In order to design for usability a number of design methods were implemented. Also two usability tests were conducted with system mock-ups, to evaluate the users’requirements.