Human-Computer Interaction

CS 6751 Winter 1996

Outline

Quick access to specific parts of this document.

  1. Project Part 0
  2. Project Notebook
  3. Project Part 1
  4. Project Part 2
  5. Project Part 3
  6. Project Presentations

Project Summary

Throughout the quarter, you will be involved in a group design project. The purpose of the project is to gain experience in applying some of the techniques from the class to a larger, more realistic design example. Each project team will consist of approximately 3 students. There will be three separately graded portions of the project throughout the quarter, and for each part, each team is to provide only one report. Within the team, you must negotiate how much work and which tasks the different individuals will perform. The grade you receive on the separate assignments will apply to all team members. The members will be polled, however, for their opinions on how much each individual has contributed to the team. We reserve the right to adjust individual scores with respect to this feedback.

You are being asked to design and evaluate an interactive application. The first task for your team is to determine what kind of application you would like to build. This quarter all projects will involve developing some aspect of the Classroom 2000 system. We will be talking about the Classroom 2000 project throughout the quarter and you will be gaining experience with various prototypes that have been designed. This will hopefully improve your understanding of the tasks that are supported well and poorly in our attempt to introduce pen-based technology into the classroom. Your first task is to describe what the application area is that your team has chosen and why. All project groups will choose a project that has to do with either pre-production, live note-taking, or post-production activities in Classroom 2000. I want to know what user tasks are being addressed, what the anticipated user population is and your rationale for why your application is worth redesigning.

Once you have determined the kind of application that you would like to build, you then will have assignments that help determine the usability of the old system and that of the new system. What will be most important in this work is not necessarily whether you can build a better system than that which already exists, but that you are able to determine a reason for improving the usability of an old system, design a prototype for a new system and determine whether it is indeed any better than the old.

Project Part 0

Due: Tuesday, January 23 (no grade)

Pick teams and choose application area with my approval.

Project Notebook

All reports and information on your project is to be collected into a Web-based notebook. Each project team is responsible for maintaining their project notebook. A notebook template is provided to suggest how you should organize project information. This is only a suggestion. Be sure to provide the instructor and TA with the URL for your project notebook. As far as possible, we will try to have all project deliverables handed in as components of this electronic notebook.

Project Part 1

Due: Thursday, January 25 (10% of overall grade)

Evaluation of old system to determine usability problems.

The objective of this part is to give you practice in summative evaluation, that is, evaluation of a system after it has been fully developed and is being used in the field. This assignment is intended to help you develop evaluation criteria appropriate to a particular system. It will also help you to gain some insight into usability problems that can guide design decisions you will make for your new system.

For this assignment, your team must:

  1. Develop at least 3 criteria for evaluating the existing system.
  2. Conduct the evaluation and collect evaluation data. This could be done by means of user questionnaire, structured interviews or measured experiments.
  3. Analyze the results of your evaluation.
  4. Write up the evaluation, indicating what is good and what is bad about the old system based on your results.
  5. Suggest ways in which the results of your evaluation can be used to inform the design of the new system which you will prototype in the next part of the project.

Deliverable:

You should turn in a 5-page report (rough guideline). Use this template as a guideline for preparing the report.

Project Part 2

Due: Tuesday, February 20 (10% of overall grade)

Prototype of new design and evaluation plan.

The objective of this part is for you to use input from the summative evaluation in Part 1 to help design and prototype a new version of your system. You will also prepare an evaluation plan that will be the basis for the last part of this project.

For this assignment, your team must:

  1. Develop a set of criteria about what improvement the new system will give to its users, based in part on the results of the last assignment. Determine a set of benchmark tasks, or usage scenarios which will be used for evaluation purposes.
  2. Sketch out a storyboard of your new design and show it to more than one potential user to elicit input. Be sure that this storyboard presentation is described in enough detail so that users can get an idea about information that will be on the screen and what changes will result from user input. Be sure to record the reaction of users to help you redesign the system.
  3. Build a computer-based prototype, using any kind of platform you desire. The only criterion for selecting platform is that you must be able to demonstrate your prototype to the instructor and it must be accessible to another project team for the evaluation in Part 3 of the project described below. Your prototype does not need to be functionally complete, but should be complete enough to give a convincing impression to candidate users.
  4. Provide a plan for evaluating the new prototype. You must choose three evaluation exercises: one participatory exercise, one theory-based evaluation (6-8) and one other evaluation exercise from Chapter 11 in the textbook. You will not be executing this evaluation plan, so you must be very explicit on exactly what evaluation should occur.
Deliverable:

Use this template as a guideline for preparing the report.

Project Part 3

Due: Thursday, February 29 (10% of overall grade)

Evaluation of prototype

The objective of this assignment is to give you experience in formative evaluation, that is evaluation during the design process. In this assignment, you will carry out the evaluation exercises outlined in the previous assignment and analyze the results of the evaluation in order to determine if the new design is an improvement over the old system and how it can be further improved.

The twist here is that you will be performing the usability evaluation on a different project than the one you designed in Part 2. Shortly after Part 2 has been handed in, we will assign projects for you to evaluate.

For this assignment, your team must:
  1. Execute the three evaluation exercises proposed in the Part 2 deliverable Evaluation Plan for the project you have been assigned.
  2. Collect and analyze the results of your evaluations.
  3. Determine what changes to the new system are suggested by your evaluation.
Deliverable:

Use this template as a guideline for preparing the report.

Project Presentations

Dead week (balance of project grade)

There will be a single project presentation after Part 3. The presentation will be brief (10-15 minutes) and will be opportunities for teams to get input from the instructors and other class members (and possible outside guests) on the progress of their work.

Deliverable:

Use this outline as a guideline for preparing your presentation. All presentation materials should be made accessible via the project notebook Web page.

Project Presentations

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