This exercise provides an opportunity to integrate and practice the concepts from the all parts of the class. In your groups, everyone will address a common problem, design and evaluate a potential solution, and present recommendations for continued development. In completing this exercise, you will write a paper describing your process and products. As an individual group exercise, this is expected to be entirely your own group’s work-acknowledge any assistance received at the end of your submission.
All groups will address the same design problem that is described below. The problem is intentionally open ended, as most design problems are. Please seek clarification about requirements from potential users rather than the professor/GTA. Your efforts will be primarily evaluated (about 2/3 total points) according to your demonstration of process, which should reflect understanding of scenario-based design, sound integration of other methods, and well-justified analysis and decision making. Less weight (about 1/3 total points) will be placed on the strength of the design in terms of the metrics stated below.
Deliverables for the projects are done in phases (discussed elsewhere). Final write-ups should be prepared in CHI format and not exceed 8-pages (to include figures and references). For this assignment, cite any reference used, including the textbook (I expect that groups will cite at least several sources, like other cases).
You and your group members are part of an 18-person software development group that identifies new clients and business opportunities. Your boss has noticed a tendency among general users to casually monitor small-sized, persistent displays (which he calls notification systems) while they are primarily engaged in other computing or work-related tasks (glancing at your email system while editing a document provides an example of this idea). He has also noticed that several prestigious companies and universities are purchasing or already own large screen displays. Given the fact that these displays sit unused for large portions of time, he feels that designing notification systems for the large screen can alleviate screen space problems for desktop users, as well as more effectively use these displays. Because many websites offer access to premium content (such as www.cnn.com), your boss thinks that these services can be enhanced if notification clients are available to inform users about newly available content on the large screen displays. He is convinced that a well-designed notification system interface can go considerably beyond the current email alerts or website headlines, and even surpass the more advanced systems such as CNN’s Newswatch ( http://newswatch.cnn.com) and ESPN’s BottomLine (http://espn.go.com/bottomline/).
Your boss wants to move beyond the ticker and develop highly visual notification summaries. In this project, he specifically wants to target notification of news-related information that is shown in an interesting and informative way on the large screen. He wants to review ideas from the entire group (i.e. your group projects) and introduce the strongest idea as a proposal to CNN for further product development funding. He has specified only a few requirements, preferring that the design teams use participatory design to identify others:
He wants teams to immediately start their design process that will lead to prototypes for very limited field testing, but he is also interested in the evolution of the actual design ideas and usability process.