Outline

• Project Report Book
• Part 0 Define teams
• Part 1 Investigate problem domain
• Part 2 Design alternatives
• Part 3 Prototype iteration and evaluation plan
• Part 4 Evaluation

Project Overview

Each project group will be graded as a team, that is, each person receives the same grade. Team members, however, will be given the opportunity to indicate the level of work done by all members of the team. Your individual performance within the team will be reflected in your class participation grade. Within the team, you must negotiate on how much and what each person will contribute. Think carefully about your team members: Where do people live and what hours do they work? Where will you meet? What skills do the different individuals bring to the group (computing, programming, design, evaluation, statistics, etc.)? You are encouraged to form a heterogeneous team full of individuals with varying skills.

Project Report Book

Part 0 - Identifying Team and Topic

This first part of the project is relatively simple. You must list the members of your team and identify the problem that you will be working on. You must also set up a Web project notebook that lists your project team members, the name of your team and will provide links to all other project deliverables. Work with the class TA to set up Web directory space for your project. A simple template for your project notebook is available for you to use. Or you can look to previous classes for ideas to copy.

Part 1 - Understanding the Problem

The key goal of this first substantive part of the project is to deeply understand that problem that you are addressing, its set of pertinent users, and the issues and constraints that are involved in the problem. You should include an assessment of the existing system currently or commonly used to accomplish these tasks. Most important is to identify important characteristics of the problem that will influence your subsequent design.

In class we will discuss different techniques for acquiring this kind of information. Feel free to utilize the techniques that you feel are most appropriate to the particular task you are examining. Your report and deliverable for this part should deeply examine the problem of study. Who are the potential users? What tasks do they seek to perform? What functionality should the system provide? Basically, you are setting up a set of constraints for your subsequent design. What criteria should be used to judge if your design is a success or not?

More specifically, you should develop the following items in this part, and you should communicate them through your report:

• an initial problem statement - an overview of what they system will do and why it is needed;
• a description of the important characteristics of the users of the system;
• a task analysis, consisting of:
  • a description of the important characteristics of the tasks performed by users;
  • a description of important characteristics of the task environment;
  • a simple structured task analysis of the problem, in one of the forms described in the textbook.
• a description of the larger system , the technical or social organization, in which your product will participate;
• an analysis of the existing system, automated or manual, including its advantages and deficiencies;
• an initial list of usability criteria, or principles, that should be used in the eventual evaluation of your design; and
• a description and justification of how the above information was gathered, including references to existing literature and on-line material that was instrumental in helping you complete this stage of the project.

Part 2 - Design Alternatives

The key goal of part 2 of the project is to create multiple design alternatives for your product. The purpose of these design alternatives is for you to explore and illustrate the potential design space. Based on your experiences creating these designs, you should iterate on the requirements and usability criteria for your product.

In this part of the project you only need to provide mock-ups, scenarios, storyboards, and sketches of your interface designs. That is, you should provide pencil-and-paper or electronic images of the interface at various stages. You do not need to build a working prototype. However, your design sketches should be sufficiently detailed for a potential user to provide useful feedback about the design. Along with your design mock-ups, you should provide a brief narrative walk-through of how the system will work. You should also include your justifications for why design decisions were made, and what you consider to be the realtive strengths and weaknesses of your different designs.

Your project report should include all the explanatory material mentioned above as well as all the design sketches, drafts, storyboards, etc., that you generated. If some of your sketches are on paper, we will provide you with access to a scanner to scan in these images. Make sure that your report adequately reflects the design process that your group undertook.

More specifically, you should develop the following items in this part, and you should communicate them through your report:

• At least three interface designs (prototypes) illustrating some portion of your product. With each design you should include:
  • A rationale for this design choice.
  • Illustrations of the design (sketches, storyboards ...)
  • At least one scenario from an end-user's perspective.
  • An assessment of this design. This assessment should include feedback from potential users.
• An explanation for why you chose this set of designs to explore the potential designs.
• A summary of modifications to your project's functional requirements and usability criteria.

As before, you will present your results in a poster session. In this session, you should aim to demonstrate the variety of the different storyboards that you explored and seek input from the gallery that will help you in determining how to narrow the design space for part 3.

Part 3 - System Prototype and Evaluation Plan

In part 3 of the project, your group will implement a detailed prototype of your product. This prototype will be provided as three specific representations. The first will be one that emphasizes the physical form factor of all artifacts to be used in your system. The second representation is a storyboard that provides a fairly complete view of the variety of tasks to be supported by your overall system. The final prototype will be a functioning software prototype that demonstrates some specific vertical slice of functionality for your system.

You will also write a detailed evaluation plan for your product utilizing multiple evaluation techniques that are tailored to evaluate your prototype against the requirements and usability criteria you earlier established.

More specifically, you should develop the following items in this part, and you should communicate them through your report:

• An overall description of your final design.
• Multiple prototypes illustrating various portions of your final design:
  • A complete description of the physical form factor of all relevant artifacts to be used. You should provide sufficient visual material to convey the essence of your intended physical form factor. If you are using available hardware, be sure to provide pictures. If you anticipate the need for novel hardware, provide detailed sketches. You should even consider building a physical model that you can show to potential users.
  • You should provide a storyboard prototype that consists attempts to describe the overall functionality of your system, covering all major tasks that your system will support. This can be done through effective use of pictures or screenshots, but does not need to be a functional version of your system. However, it needs to be detailed enough to give the reader enough of an idea of all major functions your system will support. It will also likely be the subject of at least one evaluation you will do in the next part of the project, so be sure to provide enough detail for evaluation.
  • You should provide a functional software prototype of some limited portion of your system. Ideally, this will run on an intended platform described above, but if that is not possible, you should attempt to provide a software prototype that mimics the intended platform as best as you can. The important point here is that you address only a small portio of overall function with this prototype, so choose some critical piece of functionality and implement it.
• A detailed evaluation plan. You should indicate three separate evaluation exercises that will be performed on one or all of the prototype representations. Each evaluation exercise must highlight the usability criteria to be targeted, and provide enough description of the required input for the evaluation exercise so that an experience HCI evaluator could perform the evaluation on the appropriate prototype representation.

Part 4 - Evaluation

In this final part of the project, you will provide a detailed evaluation of the prototype presented in part 3 and provide a summary of whether your prototype meets its design goals. You will conduct the evaluation planned in part 3 and report the results. No prototype will be perfect, so we will be looking for insights you gain in this stage that would feed into an improved design. More specifically, you should develop the following items in this part, your team must:

• Execute the three evaluation exercises proposed in the Part 3 deliverable Evaluation Plan for the project you have been assigned.
• Collect and analyze the results of your evaluations.
• Provide an overall assessment of your final design including areas for future work.
• Determine what changes to the new system are suggested by your evaluation.

Use this template as a guideline for preparing the report.

Instead of having an informal poster session at this stage, we will have formal final presentations by each project during the final week of the semester. Here is an outline and description of what is expected in the final presentations. This presentation will count for 25 (out of 100) points on this deliverable.