Human-Computer Interaction

CS 6751 Fall 1998

Outline

Quick access to specific parts of this document.

  1. Project Notebook
  2. Project Part 1
  3. Project Part 2
  4. Project Part 3
  5. 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 3-5 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, the suggested theme is mobile and ubiquitous computing. For some project ideas, take a look at some of the work being done within the Future Computing Environments Group. Or consult directly with the instructor.

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. The project notebook will be hosted on the Web server for this class. Each project team is responsible for securing an account on the machine and for maintaining their Web notebook. The TA can help with the initialization of Web space for the project this quarter. All project information must reside under the class Web hierarchy.

Project Part 1

Due: Oct. 22 (5% of overall grade)

Defining the project

The objective of this part is to determine the application your team will be working on and to express the important usability and utility features of your system. You will get some insight into the need for summative evaluation, that is, evaluation of a system after it has been fully developed and is being used in the field. That's because you will be asked to identify any existing application that already exists and competes with your suggested project. 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. Provide a clear description of the project application, including some typical usage scenarios.
  2. Express at least three criteria which will help you to judge whether your system is useable and/or useful.
  3. Identify an existing application, computer-based or not, that competes with your suggested project, indicating what is good and bad about that design

Deliverable:

You should turn in a report using this template as a guideline for preparing the report. This is not a lengthy assignment.

Project Part 2

Due: Tuesday, November 10 (20% 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: Tuesday, December 1 (15% 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

Beginning 11/24 (10% of overall grade)

There will be a single project presentation to report on the results of Part 3. The presentation will be brief (20 minutes, including discussion period) and will provide an opportunity 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.

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