Girard Training Stables is a horse-based nonprofit organization that offers riding lessons, mental health support, and physical therapy. A scheduling tool was recently built for them to assist in managing as many as 90 volunteers across many different events. Our goal was to add observability to this scheduling tool, as being able to better observe the tool’s internal state would make fixing any problems easier. To add this observability we added both frontend and backend monitoring to track metrics such as how many users sign up for new accounts, when users start and finish creating an event, how much the server running the website is using its resources, and how many errors are caught while the server is running. Using these metrics, we were able to gain much insight into the internal state of the website and its users. We found that the frontend metrics were useful to non-technical users, with 70% of the users surveyed being able to correctly understand the data generated and theorize about parts of the website UI that could be improved based on said data. We were also able to correctly catch and log 100% of the test errors that were generated, and send alerts to administrators if these errors led to system failure. Overall, we were able to significantly improve the observability of the Girard Training Stables scheduling tool by adding monitoring, making it more robust, scalable, and easy to improve for the future.

Girard Training Stables is a horse-based nonprofit organization that offers riding lessons, mental health support, and physical therapy. A scheduling tool was recently built for them to assist in managing as many as 90 volunteers across many different events. Our goal was to add observability to this scheduling tool, as being able to better observe the tool’s internal state would make fixing any problems easier. To add this observability we added both frontend and backend monitoring to track metrics such as how many users sign up for new accounts, when users start and finish creating an event, how much the server running the website is using its resources, and how many errors are caught while the server is running. Using these metrics, we were able to gain much insight into the internal state of the website and its users. We found that the frontend metrics were useful to non-technical users, with 70% of the users surveyed being able to correctly understand the data generated and theorize about parts of the website UI that could be improved based on said data. We were also able to correctly catch and log 100% of the test errors that were generated, and send alerts to administrators if these errors led to system failure. Overall, we were able to significantly improve the observability of the Girard Training Stables scheduling tool by adding monitoring, making it more robust, scalable, and easy to improve for the future.

As one of the first attempts to research multimedia platforms for older adults when learning an online photo-editing software, this study examined whether an audio only, a text only, or a combination of an audio and text tutorial would be the most effective teaching method. Elderly adults aged 65 and older (N-45) were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions. They first went through a training phase that utilized their assigned condition to teach five tasks within the photo-editing program, and they were then tested on how well they learned these tasks as well as a transfer task. It was predicted that the multimedia condition would increase learning efficiency, produce more successes in the transfer task, and decrease cognitive load compared to the two unimodal conditions. The multimedia condition (text and audio) had no significant effect on transfer task successes or decreases in cognitive load compared to the unimodal conditions (text only and audio only). The multimedia condition, however, did produce significantly less errors on Tasks 2, 4, and 5 than the unimodal conditions. This suggests that redundancy principles may play an important role when designing learning platforms for elderly users, and that age needs to be considered as an additional factor during the technological design process.