The initial idea for my dissertation was to produce an e-commerce website with a large emphasis on minimal mouse clicks and accessibility. Having come up with this idea after almost a years worth of thinking and still not being happy with it, I sought the help of my newly assigned dissertation supervisor (Dr. Ray McLaughlin).
After this, I decided to augment my idea by adding a layer of complexity in the form of a three-dimensional interface. However, this still did not satisfy my need for something new. So, after yet more hard thinking/lack of sleep/female intellect, I came up with the idea of a Custom Homepage User Interface. Possibly aided by the fact that the acronym of said idea reminds most people of a certain hairy beast, Ray has suggested that this project would be worthy of the label ‘first class’, if done well of course.
With CHUI, I aim to provide a ‘personal online portal’ - a place that integrates:
- File storage
- BBC News
- The weather
- Photo slide show
- Google search
- Bookmarks/favourites
All this using open source software in an efficient, accessible and attractive manner in order to produce a modern online interface for people of all ages. Ray has also reassured me that choosing CHUI over my original idea provides certain benefits. One such benefit being that e-commerce websites are now well established and it would be hard to produce a massively-accessible-mini-amazon-with-fireworks.
Next step: project specification.
I actually meant ‘RSS feeds’, not ‘BBC News’. Also, the snap.com search engine provides thumbnail previews of web pages (discovered via Netvibes). This might be worth investigating and implementing into CHUI.