| Due at varying times | CS 6751 - Human-Computer Interaction | Winter 1999 |
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.
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:
In this part of the project you only need to provide 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 realtive strengths and weaknesses of your different designs.
Accompanying your designs should be a set of usability specifications for the system. What are your objectives through the 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.
Finally, this part of the project should include an initial evaluation plan for the system. Suppose that your interface is implemented through a prototype. 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 3, so you should do your best to set it up now.
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 apper, 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.
We will utilize one full class day as a poster session at 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 and to iteratively refine their design as they head into part 3 of the project.
After your prototype is (somewhat) working, you should run a few usability studies of the system on prospective users. These users will probably be your client(s) and maybe other students from class. Your studies should simply be a carrying-out of the usability plan that your put forward in part 2. Give the users a few simple benchmark tasks and have them interact with your interface. Deploy a questionnaire to get their subjective feedback.
Your write-up for this part should include a description of your system prototype. You can include screen dumps to help explain it. Also include a description of the results of your usability studies. 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.