Grad Office Application Screen Design

Here we describe the content of each page in the system. When this is complete, any valid URL in the system should have a corresponding line here.

The entire Grad Office application will reside at https://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/grad/ogsas/, which is the front page. The URL fragments below are relative to this starting point.

• /app/ Front page for graduate admissions.
• /app/auth/ Role configuration — GradOfficeApplicationAuthorization.
• /app/applicant/ Applicant access — GradOfficeApplicationApplicantForms.
• /app/reference/ Referee access to reference forms — GradOfficeApplicationReferenceForm.
• /app/view/ Search form for applicants — GradOfficeApplicationSearchForm.
• /app/view/[uwId]/ Overall view of an individual's application — GradOfficeApplicationViewPage.

General Principles

A number of issues arise with respect to many screens in the system.

• Sorting: where applicable, lists of people or applications should be displayed and sorted by last name, first name, UW student ID number. Of course the names usually are unique, but including the UW student ID number makes the order definite in the case of multiple individuals with the same name.
• Linking: where applicable and reasonable, data should be hyperlinked when possible.
  • Emails: anywhere an email address appears on a screen, it should be a link to a mailto URI.
  • Web Addresses: anywhere a web address appears on a screen, it should be a link. If a data item is a URL from a user, it should typically be displayed as itself, as a link, rather than as words like “Link” or similar.

List of Screens

Temporary section to help work out what screens are needed, preparatory to laying them out in URL space:

Applicants

• intro page (email sends them here)
• view their application
• edit their CS form responses (possibly multiple sections if lots of questions)

Referees

• view/edit reference form (email sends them here)
• PDF download of completed reference form

Grad Office Staff

• intro page (bookmark)
• search for applications
• view any application
• post scanned document to application

-- IsaacMorland - 02 Aug 2007

Usability enhancements.

1. Redirect immediately on ID lookups (uwID, ouacID, appID).
2. Canonicalize entered ouacID's to 11 digits from [0-9]{4}-?[0-9]{6}-?0?.
3. Add a slash to all URLs by redirecting so that relative links resolve in the same manner.
4. Present links to applications with the same uwID in the application record page.
5. Show applicant's name in the title instead of appID.
6. Allow search wildcards in the name field. (Find out why SQL escaping in webpy or psycopg2 allows the percent sign wild card in a named parameter value).
7. Sort the result set by last name, first name, uwID.
8. Collapse records with the same uwID in the result set. (Might no longer be needed).

Changes related to re-focusing the data model around the person entity.

1. Show the related application, references etc. starting with the latest term.

-- IlguizLatypov on IsaacMorland's advice - 09 Aug 2007