This term you will undertake a group project (3-4 people) to
evaluate some computing-related task/problem, to develop interface
design alternatives for the task/problem, to implement a prototype of
your design, and to evaluate your design. This project should provide
you with hands-on experience with the tasks that interface designers
face every day. Ideally, the topic of the project will be
a problem that matters to some "real-life" people. These people then
will serve as your "clients", whom you must communicate with and
learn from. We will be providing a list of possible projects for you
to consider or you can come up with your own topic. If you do the
latter, you must get it approved a priori. It is your responsibility
to contact the clients for your project. They will not come to you.
Each project group will be graded as a team, that is, each person
receives the same grade. I will poll team members, however, to make
sure that all members are contributing. Lack of participation may
precipitate an individual reduction of 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.)? I would strongly encourage you
to form a heterogeneous team full of individuals with varying skills.
Each part of the project will include a deliverable report. This
report will be placed on the WWW and should be written in HTML. Each
team should have a "home" page which includes: 1) a brief (paragraph)
description of the problem/task; 2) the team members; 3) Links to the
reports for project parts 1-4 (no report is needed for part 0). The
format of the reports for the individual parts is up to you, but it
should be professionally prepared, expressive, grammatically sound,
illustrative of your efforts and process, and easy to view and
understand. A good design effort can easily be hampered by a poor
communication of what was done. We will help you get space for your
pages and get this all set up.
Due August 28
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 also must set up your web project space that lists
your team name, members, and provides links to all of the project
deliverables. Work with the TA to set this up.
Due September 18
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. If the task has an existing system/interface, you should
perform an interpretive evaluation of that system to help you learn
more about it. Most important is 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 overview of what they system will do and why it's 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.
An interpretive evaluation (eg., heuristic evaluation,
walkthrough, etc.) of the existing system/interface, if one exists.
A brief description and justification of how the above information was
gathered.
Most important: A discussion of the implications of what
you learned above.
The last item in the list above is critical. Don't just describe the
target users, tasks, environment, etc. You must also tell us how
these attributes should/will influence your design. Are there any
implications to be made from the user profiles and other data you
learned? We will be very careful to look for this information in your
report.
Due October 11
The key goal of part 2 of the project is to use the knowledge gained
in part 1, as well as that from class, to develop a set of design
alternatives for your problem. These multiple design alternatives
should explore the potantial design space for the problem.
In this part of the project you will develop
mock-ups, 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. Your design sketches should be sufficiently detailed for a
potential user to provide useful feedback about the design, however.
Along with your design mock-ups, you should provide a brief narrative
walk-through of how the system will work. Perhaps most importantly,
you should also include your justifications for why design decisions
were made, and what you consider to be the relative strengths and
weaknesses of your different designs.
The design process you follow here is important. Don't do the
following: The group splits up and everyone creates one design,
then these are all your alternatives to be turned in. This is not how
a good, creative design process should work. It should be more like a
brainstorming session with all team members present. You should seek
to create some fundamentally different design ideas, concepts all over the
potential design space for the problem you have chosen.
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. The key in this part of the
project is to come up with many different design ideas, not
just a small set of wiggles from some basic design. You should plan
on turning in at least three different designs.
We will utilize one full class day as a poster session near the end of
this part of the project. Each group will post some of their design
ideas on a poster in class. Everyone will then circulate and interact
with the designers. The idea here is that each group can use this
opportunity to get feedback about their design ideas as they narrow
their design space and head into part 3 of the
project.
Due November 4 (extended to Nov. 6)
In part 3 of the project, your group will implement a detailed
prototype of your interface.
You can use any software that you would like to assist this process
(e.g., VB, Hypercard, Director, etc.). You should
be able to get much of the interface functionality working, but
clearly you will not be able to implement all back-end application
functionality.
Additionally, you must provide a set of initial usability
specifications for your system and a plan for an evaluation of
it. To develop usability specifications, consider the objectives of
your design. For
example, if you are working on a calendar manager, you might specify
time limits in which you expect a user to be able to schedule or
modify an appointment, or a maximum number of errors that you expect
to occur. Basically, you should list a set of criteria by which your
interface can be evaluated.
Further, this part of the project should include an initial evaluation
plan for the system. What kinds of benchmark tasks would you have
users perform to help evaluate the interface? What kind of subjective
questionnaire would you deploy to have a user critique the interface?
You will need to actually carry out some of this evaluation in part 4,
so you should do your best to set it up now. The key here is not to
do some exhaustive description of a usability evaluation plan, but to
motivate why the particular plan you propose is appropriate for this
interface.
Note that developing an initial evaluation plan is also a
good way to figure out how much of the interface you need to develop.
You should be able to build and connect to enough of
the application functionality to be able to conduct an initial usability
evaluation with the benchmark tasks as you are proposing here.
Your write-up for this part should include a description of your
system prototype. You can include screen dumps to help explain it and
text to describe how a user would interact with it.
Discuss the implementation challenges you faced. Were there aspects
that you wanted to build but were unable to do so? The key component
to include in your project report is a justification of why you
settled on the design that you chose. What's special about this
particular design with respect your problem?
The report for
this part also must include the usability specifications that you
established and a description of the evaluation that you are
planning. This needs not be too detailed here as the actual
evaluation will occur in part 4. We will try to give you helpful
feedback about your plan here to assist with the testing in part 4.
After this part is complete, each group will demo their system for the
professor and the TA.
Due December 6
In the final part of the project, your group will conduct an
evaluation of the prototype developed in part 3. You should utilize the
evaluation measures that you identified in that part as well.
We expect that your evaluation will involve sample users interacting
with your system. These users
will likely be your client(s) and maybe other students from class or
other people who would fit your target user population.
Give the users a few simple
benchmark tasks and have them interact with your interface. Closely
study what occurs. Deploy a
questionnaire to get their subjective feedback about the interface and
interaction.
Your write-up for this part should include the following components:
A description of the evaluation techniques, tasks and users
involved in your study
Design rationale for the evaluation tasks and materials you
employed
Description of the results of the study (data presentation)
A discussion of the results
The implications that you make from the results with respect to
your design
A description of how the prototype design could be improved in
light of the implications
The key to this part of the project is not to simply describe your
evaluation methodology but to rise above that and describe what you
learned from it. Explain why you chose the
benchmark tasks that you did. Why did you ask users what you asked?
What conclusions can you draw from the studies? 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.
December 2-6
The design project will culminate in a session in which each group
presents their system to the class and to their clients. Each group
will be expected to give a professional 10-15 minute summary and
walk-through of their design and prototype. It is important that you
do a good job communicating all your efforts for the quarter. You
want to make sure that your objectives in the project are discussed,
your system is clearly presented, and that your design process is
communicated. Also describe what you learned from your usability
study. Practice your presentation! Ten to fifteen minutes is not
long---plan accordingly.