Assessment Criteria for CS4753/PSY4753

Specifications for these assignments can be found in this website. Be sure to follow the directions carefully as your will be judged on how well you fulfill the specified deliverables. Questions regarding the assignments can be directed to Dr. Newstetter at any time via email. The purpose these two assignments is to assess your individual analytical skills and to give you the opportunity to balance group assessment with individual assessment.

** 10/5/98 - Note on grading for the "Looking for the Interface" assignment.  These will be handed back on Tuesday Oct 6.  If you received a "C" or lower, you may redo and resubmit the assignment for a potential increase of one letter grade within one week.  Please let Colleen know if you plan to resubmit an assignment.  See Colleen or Wendy if you have questions about the grades.

Team Assessment

The reason we are asking you to work in teams is to simulate design as it exists in the real world. Designing and building systems for real people in real settings is done collaboratively. There is a good reason for this--- building effective systems to support the work and lives of people demands a variety of skills and knowledge that a single individual rarely has. Teams of experts consisting of anthropologists, graphic artists, software engineers and programmers bring a broad spectrum of talents to bear in solving a design problem. And this can happen with you. The challenge is uncovering and harnessing the talents of your teams.

Working with others is often problematic for a number of reasons: different individual working and communication styles, time and resource constraints, skills inequalities, real and faulty perceptions of others talents etc. The challenge is to overcome the difficulties of group endeavor and find the rewards. If at any time, a team is experiencing grave difficulties, Dr. Newstetter will gladly meet with the whole team to try and resolve the situation. But don't wait until it is too late.

Your team will be assessed on three types of assignments:
 

Firstly, the group will need to buy a notebook to maintain the design project log. This will be a narrative account from start to finish of the project. At every meeting, someone needs to scribe the events that unfold as the group works the problem. What happens first? What new things are brought to the table? Do these contribute to the evolving design? Are they discarded? How is the group working? Problems? Achievements? What are the inside workings of the group? The log should contain text, notes, sketches, jottings, scribblings or whatever represents what the team has done. It does not have to be neat or in perfect prose--quite the contrary. It is more like a diary or journal of the group's progress, impediments, successes, failures, ways of working or failing to work. At the end of the project, an outsider to your group would be able to read the design log and, in a sense, take the group's journey from first meeting to final prototype. If you keep a detailed design log, developing the final website will be easy.

There will be three times in the course when you will make your group work available for others to engage with and critique. Each presentation of your evolving design will be very different because your understanding of the design problem will be different. The challenge for the group will be to design an appropriate presentation for others that communicates your ideas/concepts clearly and concisely. At times the presentation might consist of questions or text, at others sketches, at others partially working prototypes or screen shots. You will need to determine what is appropriate for where you are in the design space.

An end of term jury review, similar to what happens in an architectural studio, will involve outside experts. Each team will make a presentation of their design and will be questioned and interact with the experts. The goal is to make a persuasive argument for your design. To do this you will need to articulate the problem well and show how your solution addresses important problem features. This review will, of course, follow lots of critiquing that has occurred in the class to prepare you. Expert opinions of your work are less important in the assessment than your presentation and demonstrated problem understanding.

In lieu of a final exam, your team will build a design recovery website.

Every whole story, Aristotle tells us, has a beginning, a middle, and an end (Butcher, 1902).  In order to give the details of their experience a beginning, middle, and end, people must reflect on their experience.  It is this process of selecting constitutive details of experience, reflecting on them, giving them order, and thereby making sense of them that makes telling stories a meaning-making experience.

 --from Seidman (1998), Interviewing as Qualitative Research, p.1.

1. To give you a chance to look back on the work you've done this quarter. Reflecting on what you've done is as critical for learning as doing the project in the first place.
2. To give us a chance to see what you learned from the project and how you went about it.
3. To provide a resource for future students to learn from.

• A basic description of the project and your final design. This should contain enough detail so that someone reading this on the web later can understand what you were working on.
• A description of 3-5 aspects of your design and how they came to be. These should be written as "stories" and should use information from your design journal. You might include sketches, ideas, problems, issues, data from experiments or interviews, etc. to show what was happening. Also, include your thoughts and opinions now that you look back at things -- think of this as a way to provide advice to future students.

• What aspects of the design should you discuss? Most of all, they should be something that you find interesting. They could be aspects you're happy with, ones you're still not happy with, ones that you changed alot, ones that you think are really good examples of design, ones that developed in an unusual way, ones you think someone could learn something from, etc.
• How should you organize the site? You might consider different metaphors for inspiration: an archaeologist discovering an artifact, a self-guided museum tour, a magazine article with sidebars and references, etc.
• How can you get access to equipment needed? If you need help learning HTML, access to a scanner, a place to put things on the web, or anything else along these lines, contact Colleen.

Individual work: 40% (Assignments, class attendance and participation)

HCI Project:  60%  (Presentations and final design recovery website)