Part 4: Evaluation and Final Presentation
In the final part of the project, your group will conduct an evaluation of the prototype developed in part 3. You should utilize the evaluation measures that you identified in that part as well. Your evaluation will involve sample users interacting with your system. These users will likely be your client(s) and maybe other students from class or other people who would fit your target user population. The details of your evaluation are up to you, but as a rule of thumb you will most likely give the users some simple benchmark tasks and have them interact with your interface, and closely study what occurs. You might also use methods like questionnaires to get their subjective feedback about the interface and interaction.
Your write-up for this part should include the following components:
- A description of the evaluation techniques, tasks and users involved in your study
- Design rationale for the evaluation tasks and materials you employed, as well as the users you selected
- Description of the results of the study (data presentation)
- A discussion of the results
- The implications that you take from the results with respect to your design
- A description of how the prototype design could be improved in light of these implications
The key to this part of the project is not to simply describe your evaluation methodology but to rise above that and describe what you learned from it in a number of areas. Explain why you chose the benchmark tasks that you did. Why did you ask users what you asked? 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." A good writeup should honestly and carefully assess your design and clearly provide a plan for its improvement.
In addition to the final write-up, we will use a class period for detailed team presentations. Plan for 30 minutes, including questions.
Teams should present their system to the class, and walk through the design and prototype (including a demo if appropriate). It is important that you do a good job communicating all your efforts for the semester, discussing your objectives in the project, your system design, and your design process. Also describe what you learned from your usability study.