Group Project: Human-Computer Interface Design
Outline
Quick access to the sections of this document:
Project Overview
This quarter you will undertake a group project (3-5 people) to
evaluate some computing-related task/problem, to develop interface
design alternatives for the task/problem, to implement a prototype of
your design, and to plan the evaluation of your design. This project should provide
you with hands-on experience with the tasks that interface designers
face every day.
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. Your performance within the team
will be reflected in your class participation 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.
Each part of the project will include a deliverable report. This
report will be placed on the WWW and should be written in HTML. Each
team should have a "home" page which includes: 1) a brief (paragraph)
description of the problem/task; 2) the team members; 3) Links to the
reports for project parts 1-3 (no report is needed for part 0). The
format of the reports for the individual parts is up to you, but it
should be professionally prepared, expressive, grammatically sound,
illustrative of your efforts and process, and easy to view and
understand. A good design effort can easily be hampered by a poor
communication of what was done. We will help you get space for your
pages and get this all set up.
Due January 18
This first part of the project is relatively simple. You must list
the members of your team and identify the problem that you will be
working on.
Due January 29
The key goal of this first substantive part of the project is to
deeply understand that problem that you are addressing, its set of
pertinent users, and the issues and constraints that are involved in
the problem. You should include an assessment of the existing system
current used to accomplish these tasks.
Most important is identify important characteristics
of the problem that will influence your subsequent design.
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:
- A initial problem statement - an overview of what they system will do and
why it's needed.
- A description of the important characteristics of the users of
the system.
- A description of the important characteristics of the tasks
performed by users.
- A simple task analysis of the problem.
- A description of important characteristics of the task
environment.
- A description of the system in which your product will participate.
- An analysis of the existing system including its advantages and deficiencies.
- An initial list of usability criteria that should be used in the eventual
evaluation of your design.
- A description and justification of how the above information was
gathered.
You should turn in a report using this
template as a guideline for preparing the
report.
Due February 19
The key goal of part 2 of the project is to create multiple design alternatives for
your product. The purpose of these design alternatives is for you to explore
and illustrate the potential design space. Based on your experiences creating these
designs, you should iterate on the requirements and usability criteria for your
product.
In this part of the project you only need to provide
mock-ups, scenarios, 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.
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.
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.
More specifically, you should develop the following items in this
part, and you should communicate them through your report:
- At least three interface designs (prototypes)
illustrating some portion of your product.
With each design you should include:
- A rationale for this design choice.
- Illustrations of the design (sketches, storyboards ...)
- At least one scenario from an end-user's perspective.
- An assessment of this design. This assessment should include feedback
from potential users.
- An explanation for why you chose this set of designs to explore
the potential designs.
- A summary of your modifications to your requirements specification
and your usability criteria.
You should turn in a report using this
template as a guideline for preparing the
report.
We will utilize one full class day as a poster session at the end of
this part of the project. Each group will post information of their
project including material from parts I and II.
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.
Due March 12
In the final part of the project, your group will implement a
detailed prototype(s) of your product. In most cases you should use
multiple prototypes (storyboards, sketches, computational) to illustrate
your final design.
You should also write a detailed evaluation plan for your product utilizing
multiple evaluation techniques.
You should include in your design description an assessment of your design
that is substantially based on feedback from potential end-users. (Hint - one
way to debug your evaluation plan is to test it on end-users).
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.
More specifically, you should develop the following items in this
part, and you should communicate them through your report:
- An overall description of your final design.
- Multiple prototypes illustrating various portions of your
final design. With each prototype include:
- Sufficient visual material to convey the prototype.
- At least one scenario from an end-user's perspective.
- An assessment of this aspect of your design. This assessment should include feedback
from potential users.
- A detailed evaluation plan.
- An overall assessment of your final design including areas for future work.
- A summary design rationale detailing your design process.
You should turn in a report using this
template as a guideline for preparing the
report.
As before, you will present your results in a poster session. Although your
poster should focus your final design and evalaution, it should still tell
a complete story.