Simple Hike Planner

Patrick Salisbury, https://a2-pjsalisbury.glitch.me/

This project aims to provide a simple way of creating and storing a hiking trip. This can be used as both a simple calculator to determine hiking distances/elevations as well as a way to let others view the trip you have planned. The interface is simple, but instructions for usage are provided on the site.

This page uses the CSS flexbox positioning technique for many elements. The text width/margins also adjust to suit a variety of screen widths, and a web-safe font is used.

Technical Achievements

• Tech Achievement 1: For this achievement I created a single-page app that updates the data stored on the server as needed. On page refresh, the data is again updated to make sure the data from a previous session is always displayed.

Design/Evaluation Achievements

• Design Achievement 1: For this achievement I tested my user interface with a friend. I tasked him with adding a simple hiking trip to the page, closing the page, coming back "at a later time," and changing his planned hike to something else.

1. Hussey

2. The major problem the user had was inputting a negative number for an elevation loss. The user seemed to have to go out of his way to add a downhill trail to the data.

3. The most surprising thing to me was how good of a feature it is to have your text boxes stay populated after clearing the server data. The user commented about this feature twice, once since I left old "garbage" data in the server and again to make the second trip.

4. The main thing I would change would probably be to add a positive/negative button next to the elevation gain tab to make the process easier without needing to input a negative number. I may also consider adding a button to change the displayed units, even though the units aren't actually stored in data and technically you could input metric units anyways, but you would simply have to remember that you did that instead of having a way to change the units.