| Project Overview | CS 4750B - User Interface Design | Spring 2003 |
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
In part 3 of the project, your group will implement a detailed prototype of your product. In most cases you should use multiple presentations of this final prototype (storyboards, sketches, and functioning computational artifacts) to illustrate your final design.
You should 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.
You should include in your design description an assessment of your design that is substantially based on feedback from potential end-users. (Hint - one way to debug your evaluation plan is to test it on end-users). What aspects of your design "worked" and what failed to meet your specifications? If you had more time to work on the design, what would you now change and improve? Remember, no designer ever gets a system "just right." We will reward teams who honestly and carefully assess their design and who clearly provide a plan for its improvement.
More specifically, you should develop the following items in this part, and you should communicate them through your report:
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:
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.