Young Designers 2011

		Young Designers 2011
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Debasmita Karmakar | debasmita1983@gmail.com

Designing Eclipse-based mapping tool

Information and Interface Design | PGDPD
Guide: Manoj Neelkanthan
Sponsor: Progress Software Corporation, Hyderabad

Keywords
Mapping
User-centered
Tool
Desktop application

The project I worked on was an eclipse-based mapping system for mapping different product artefacts.
Most Progress products need a ‘mapper’ to map different artefacts when they have to access the data from different products as part of business process completion. Every product team is required to develop their own mapper, adding to the effort that is needed to build the whole product. In this project, I had to make a generic mapper which could be used for multiple products. Its target users included software developers or business analysts who had a strong technical knowledge of software programming.
The aim of this project was to find out from different product teams the common requirements for mapping, make a generic protocol for mapping and to solve the issues that were present in individual product mappers. I focused on the interaction between the different elements of mapping, layout of the mapping editor, displaying error message, different eclipse views (graphical, tabular, properties etc.) for the mapping information and visual design of the tool. An iterative user-centered design process was followed to achieve the described users and business goals. The process included user-ystem study, expert reviews, ideations, stakeholders’ review and detailed design mock-ups. The final solution was an eclipse-based graphical mapping tool which could be commonly used by different Progress products. Future requirements were also suggested with the solution.
The most important lesson learnt during this project was how I could apply the knowledge I had gained at NID in a real-life scenario. Working in a rigid system, I also learnt how to think broader when the scope was narrow, by accepting the environment and empathizing with the users.