CS 4753 Class Project Part 1: Questionnaire Design Due: Friday, April 12, noon Objectives To create quality user interfaces it is necessary to gather data about the characteristics of potential users of your system. This assignment is designed to give you practice writing, testing, and administering a questionnaire to a true user population. Although it does not train you in the very fine points of questionnaire design, it does alert you to the basic problems in obtaining valid responses from humans. In addition to practice in questionnaire design and administration, the assignment asks you to focus information about a user interface to a computer system. Its intent is to help you develop probing skills (through good question design). These skills can then be used to find out what failures and successes users are having with a system and even the underlying causes for these successes and failures. Description of the Project You are being asked to develop a questionnaire to find out information about an existing interactive application which relates to the interface design you will be asked to develop in the series of course assignments that follow. The first thing for you to do is to select the task for which you intend to develop a user interface. Once you have selected your design task, you will be in a position of collecting information about potential users of the interface. One of the methods of collecting this information is to look at existing applications that have things in common with the interface you are designing, i.e. the computer program accomplishes the same or similar tasks, or you believe that the task that the program supports is in many ways similar to the task you will be supporting with your interface design. For example, if you were building a design for an interface which helped users find out which books were available in the school library system, you might look at the existing interface for accomplishing this task. The type of information you are to obtain about the user interface through the careful design of your questionnaire is the following: - How easy has the system been for them to learn? - What are the particular parts of the system that they are having the - most trouble with? - What kinds of recommendations do they have for improving the system? - How useful are the manuals or other documentation for the system? - How much time are they spending on learning the system? Unfortunately, the questions above can't be used directly because they won't generate very good answers. Question 1 is too ambiguous. Question 2 is much too broad to get useful answers. Question 3 is too difficult for new users. Question 4 is again ambiguous and users do not have the information to answer question 5. Also, since the amount of difficulty a person has with the system depends on that person's previous experience, whether they are computer science majors, whether they are highly motivated, and whether they have a good friend who is helping them out a lot, questions have to be asked about all these factors as well. Design a questionnaire to administer to the users of the system of your choice. Administer that questionnaire to 2 compatriots to determine if they understand the questions in the same way you meant the questions. You do this by giving them the questionnaire to fill in and then asking them what their answers mean and what they thought your question meant. (This is called pilot testing the questionnaire.) Once you have received feedback from your 2 trial respondents, use this to redesign your questionnaire. If the design changes drastically, it is a good idea to test your questionnaire again on 2 additional friends. When you feel your questionnaire has been tested enough and will work on the targeted set of users, find 3 or 4 users who fit the eligibility requirements for your survey. Ask these users to fill out one of your questionnaires. (We wouldn't use such a low number of respondents in a real study, but it's OK here.) Summarize the data collected from your questionnaires. The structured question answers are usually presented as percentages, e.g., 25 percent responded "strongly disagree'' to the question, "Should the system always have menus available?'' Often the percentages are presented across demographic data, e.g., "30 percent of the women and 35 percent of the men would like to have less commands to learn.'' A clear way to present this information is in tables. Use the data results of your questionnaire to suggest changes that might be made to the user interface to make it easier for users to learn and use the system. These can be changes in manuals and training as well as detailed changes to the interface commands and the documentation. Specific Directions This assignment will have 8 specific steps. They are: 1 Selection of a task for your interface design. 2 Selection of an analogous interface to study. 3 Preparation of a draft questionnaire (1-2 pages). 4 Piloting of the draft questionnaire. 5 Preparation of a final questionnaire. 6 Administration of the final questionnaire. 7 Analysis of the results. 8 Write-up of the results of the survey. Your group should turn in: 1 A four page write-up on the results of the survey with the final portion recommending any changes to be made to the studied user interface. The write-up should include a discussion of the reasons for each question or set of questions in your questionnaire, as well as a brief description of your target interface design and the similar system you chose to study. Only the first four pages (not including the items below) will be considered in determining your grade. 2 The draft questionnaire. 3 The final questionnaire. 4 A one page sheet describing why you changed any questions on the final questionnaire. What you will be evaluated on You will be judged on both the content of the paper and its presentation. In terms of content, you will be judged on originality, innovativeness, adhering to good human-computer design principles,etc. In terms of presentation, you will be judged on quality of writing, expressiveness, and grammatical correctness. The group score will contribute 5 percent of your final grade. Due Date All material for this assignment should be turned in to eugene@cc by Friday April 12, noon.