CS3724, Fall 2000

Due at your team's assigned class time on the class calendar

Activities

1. Prepare a 15 minute presentation to the class, summarizing your whole project, but emphasizing the formative evaluation activity and its results. A presentation time of this size is about the typical project manager can afford. Each team will be strictly held to this time limit. If you go over, the professor will stop you and your grade will be affected. Practice will help eliminate this problem. On average, a fairly full overhead tends to take about 2 minutes for most people to present! So you should probably not prepare 30 overheads for your presentation. It is certainly possible to present an overhead in less than 2 minutes, but it may take practice and it may not be advisable.
2. You can decide how your team will make its presentation. One person, or your whole team, or in between, can present. If you have more than one presenter, the transition should be smooth.
3. Your presentation should look professional, prepared with a word processor or presentation package (e.g. PowerPoint), using plastic transparencies. Use of a key screen shot or two is encouraged, to give context to your talk. These can be neatly hand drawn if that is how you created your prototype. Black and white is fine.

Content and order of your presentation

Feel free to draw as much of the presentation information/content as you wish from your write-up for your previous projects. You probably have everything you need in those write-ups, if they were well-done.

1. An introductory slide (Project Name, Client, Team Members' Names, etc.)
2. Introduction to your project, your client, how you found the client, the application and its setting, anything about the work environment (e.g., dirt, noise, confusion, greasy fingers).
3. Description of the user classes and general tasks (these can be the key tasks you developed in your prototype), and how you collected this information.
4. Usability goals for your project.
5. How design evolved, including metaphor/model, basic design decisions, how the design addressed user and task needs, etc. This is where you can include several key screen shots. (Your audience is technical and wants to know in some detail about your design.)
6. Formative evaluation process, including number of participants and why/how chosen, location of sessions, etc. For any participants not from client organization, justify their use as a representative user. Make some comments about how the evaluation process went for you. Was it a success in helping you find usability problems?
7. Summarize your quantitative results, showing a comparison with your usability specification (use usability specification table form, plus a little discussion).
8. Show three of your most interesting usability problems (in cost/importance table form, sorted by priority rank). Explain why they were interesting/serious, and explain your analysis of them. Also indicate your redesign solution to address these problems.
9. Optional: Give any interesting or unusual experiences you had (these can be good things, lessons learned, how the process worked (or didn't) for you, what you would do differently next time, difficulties, whatever...) during the entire project/process.

The oral presentation in class is the only deliverable. This part of the project has no written deliverable.

WARNING: Every semester there are teams who suffer badly due to Murphy's Law! If you are going to use the computer display system to do a PowerPoint presentation, everyone bring the file on a separate diskette. If you are using plastic overheads made at Kinko's, for example, get them in hand the day before. Don't be stuck at presentation time without your talk on file or on plastic. Avoid disaster!