Additionally, you must provide a set of initial usability specifications for your system and a plan for an evaluation of it. To develop usability specifications, consider the objectives of your 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.
Further, this part of the project should include an initial evaluation plan for the system. 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 4, so you should do your best to set it up now. The key here is not to do some exhaustive description of a usability evaluation plan, but to motivate why the particular plan you propose is appropriate for this interface.
Note that developing and motivating an initial evaluation plan is also a good way to figure out how much of the interface you need to develop. You should be able to build and connect enough of the application functionality to be able to conduct an initial usability evaluation with the benchmark tasks as you are proposing here.
Your write-up for this part should include a description of your system prototype. You can include screen dumps to help explain it and text to describe how a user would interact with it. Discuss the implementation challenges you faced. Were there aspects that you wanted to build but were unable to do so? The key component to include in your project report is a justification of why you settled on the design that you chose. What's special about this particular design with respect your problem?
The report for this part also must include the usability specifications that you established and a description of the evaluation that you are planning. Remember that the actual evaluation will occur in Part 4, so you don't need to actually run the evaluation now--just describe the plan and justify it. I will try to give you helpful feedback about your plan here to assist with the testing in Part 4.
We will utilize one full class day for teams to present their prototypes in class; the writeups will be due in class (in hardcopy form) that day. Grading will be based on fidelity of prototype, quality of design, design rationale/justification, and quality of presentation.