Project 6: Project Presentation

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

Overview

This is the part of your project where you get to show everyone else in the class what you've been doing all this time.

What To Do

Prepare and present a 15-minute "slide show", showing off your project and informing the class about what happened in each step.

How To Do It

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 what the typical project manager can afford. Each team will be strictly held to this time limit. If you go over, the intstuctor will stop you and your grade will be affected. Practice will help eliminate this problem. On average, a fairly full slide tends to take up to 2 minutes for most people to present! So you should probably not prepare 20 slides for your presentation. I think about 10 slides would be about right.
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.
Your presentation should look professional, prepared with presentation software (e.g. PowerPoint). Use of a key screen shot or two is encouraged, to give context to your talk. You can use my laptop or yours to give the presentation in the classroom. Most people prefer to retain maximum control over problems by using their own laptop. This requires only connecting to the projector (and possibly the Internet) in the classroom. If you wish to use my classroom laptop, you must send the presentation files to me in advance, or bring it to class on a floppy disk, CD-ROM, or a USB drive.

Content and order of your presentation

Feel free to draw as much of the presentation information/content as you wish from your write-ups of your previous project parts. You probably have everything you need in those write-ups, if they were well-done. Keep the introductory and background information to a minimum. Your time is short; use it mostly for the interesting stuff like the design and formative evaluation, especially the results. Your presentation should include (as bullet points (not lots of narrative text) on PowerPoint (or equivalent) slides:

An introductory slide (Project Name, Client, Team Members' Names, etc.)
Introduction to your project, your client, the application and its setting, anything about the work environment (e.g., dirt, noise, confusion, greasy fingers).
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.
Usability goals for your project.
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.)
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?
Summarize your quantitative results, showing a comparison with your usability specification (use usability specification table form, plus a little discussion).
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.
Describe 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.

You must practice your presentation several times to get a smooth and interesting talk and keep within your time limit.

Deliverables

The presentation in class is the only deliverable. This part of the project has no written deliverable. This is the form I will use to evalute your presentation.

WARNING

Every semester there are teams who suffer badly due to Murphy's Law! Don't be stuck with a problem at presentation time. If you're using your own laptop, make sure it works with the classroom projector. If you're using my laptop, make sure your PowerPoint files work OK on it. Remember that my classroom laptop is very slow, especially in loading files. If you wait until it's your presentation time to load your files, loading time comes out of your time limit. Avoid disaster by planning ahead!