Text Entry Box Functionality

The group envisions the text entry box at the start of the user experience (UX) as being a way to populate the drop down fields of year, make, model, and symptom. So the user would enter something like "My 2002 Honda Civic won't start", and the appropriate boxes will be filled.

This presents us with some challenges though. How complicated do we want this feature to be? We have learned from Professor Ackley that being one of the first and physically largest parts of the UX it is drawing a lot of attention, and subsequently should be pretty impressive in it's own right.

While we want to avoid having to write a complex search engine, we also want it to have decent functionality. This provides us a continuum of functionality on which we need to place a goal--from exceptionally smart and intuitive to less functional but easy to implement. In the near future I will discuss some ideas for adding this functionality, and maybe with thought to actual implementation this decision will become easy to make.