Project: The product

In this semester, we will implement and enhance a simple personal assistant, Duke. In the initial phase, you will design and develop Duke to manage tasks for a user. A sample interaction with Duke is as shown below.

    ____________________________________________________________
      ____        _        
     |  _ \ _   _| | _____ 
     | | | | | | | |/ / _ \
     | |_| | |_| |   <  __/
     |____/ \__,_|_|\_\___|

     Hello! I'm Duke
     What can I do for you?
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list
    ____________________________________________________________
     Here are the tasks in your list:
     1.[T][✓] read book
     2.[D][✗] return book (by: June 6th)
     3.[E][✗] project meeting (at: Aug 6th 2-4pm)
     4.[T][✓] join sports club
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todo borrow book
    ____________________________________________________________
     Got it. I've added this task: 
       [T][✗] borrow book
     Now you have 5 tasks in the list.
    ____________________________________________________________

bye
    ____________________________________________________________
     Bye. Hope to see you again soon!
    ____________________________________________________________

This product is meant for users who can type fast, and prefer typing over mouse/voice commands. Therefore, Command Line Interface (CLI) is the primary mode of interaction.

 

• Recommendation-CLI-First: As per Constraint-Typing-Preferred, the input to the app needs to be primarily commands based (i.e., the app should be a CLI app). A GUI can be implemented and used to give visual feedback to the user rather than to collect input. While we don't prohibit non-CLI inputs, note that such inputs will reduce the suitability of the product to target users, which will be graded under the product design criterion.
  Some suggestions:
  • Give keyboard alternatives to mouse/GUI inputs, if any.
  • Regular typing is usually faster than using key combinations. Design the app in a way that you can do stuff faster by typing compared to mouse actions or key combinations.
  • One-shot commands are faster over multi-step commands. If you provide a multi-step command to help new users, you also need to provide a one-shot equivalent for regular/expert users.  Reason: We want the user to be able to accomplish tasks faster using CLI than a GUI; having to enter commands part-by-part will slow down the user.