This is a group project, with groups consisting of 3-5 people. Each project group will be graded as a team; that is, each person receives the same grade. However, I will poll team members to make sure that all members are contributing, and the poll results will result in extra credit for those who contribute significantly and possibly a loss of credit for those who miss deadlines and meeting. As you choose your project team, you must negotiate on how much and in what ways each person will contribute. Think carefully about your team members: Where do people live and what hours do they work? Where will you meet? What skills do the different individuals bring to the group (computing, programming, design, evaluation, statistics, etc.)? I would strongly encourage you to form a heterogeneous team full of individuals with varying skills.
I will maintain a list of project ideas for you to select from. This list will constantly change until the Part 0 deadline, so visit it often if you are looking for an idea. If you have an idea of your own, please email it to the professor and it will be added to the page to help you obtain more group members.
Part 0 of the project is straightforward: identify a problem that your project will address, and assign roles for each member of your group. Several project ideas will be posted and given in class, but feel free to borrow or reuse ideas from previous or ongoing projects from your research, from other classes, or from jobs. If you choose to attempt a project not posted, be sure and clear it with me before turning in Part 0. For the project, you will establish an online project report book that you will update throughout the semester.
By the Part 0 due date, the report book should contain a team/project name, a one-paragraph description of the problem that you plan to address and a list of team members and their anticipated roles. Email the URL for your team to the TA, Iype Isac. He will add it to the projects page so that others can visit your page.
Part 1 of this project asks you to perform a requirements analysis to develop an understanding of the needs presented in your project. You will refine the problem domain identified in Part 0, talk with people vital to the success of your project, and identify scenarios and claims from various perspectives. The deliverable for part 1 is a writeup in HTML linked to your project web page by the due date. If you choose to turn it in early and would like feedback, please also send the professor an email indicating that you have posted the writeup.
Initially, you must develop a root concept (as described in Chapter 2) that will help guide you through the remainder of the project. The root concept must refine the project vision and rationale, describe the key people impacted by the project, and acknowledge constraints and assumptions that you feel are necessary. The root concept should lead to a field study plan that includes a schedule for interviews, a list of questions, and roles that each group member will have in the process.
In any development effort, it is essential to talk with the people who will be impacted by your efforts. You should talk in depth with your primary project contact as well as a representative collection of target users. If possible and appropriate, visit places that will be impacted by your project. You will want to take notes, and you may want to take pictures and collect other artifacts that are revealing to the current and planned activities within your problem domain. Examples of such artifacts might be screenshots from existing systems, printouts generated by the systems, and photos of the work area. Your report should summarize and discuss the data that you collect.
Using the collected data, you should then develop representative scenarios that illustrate the problems faced in your problem domain. Develop at least five scenarios that capture the important issues that you plan to address from the perspectives of each group impacted by your efforts. Be sure your scenarios address tasks, situations, and users. The scenarios should be realistic, but need to be based on actual episodes observed or described to you. For each scenario, analyze at least one claim, focusing on both positive and negative consequences.
This should provide for you an understanding of the problem and potential solutions. You should outline the solution that you plan to develop in the second part of the project, and speculate about ways in which you will evaluate your efforts in the third part. Since we will not have discussed in detail aspects of design and testing, this part will be somewhat speculative.
Part 2 of this project asks you to design and develop an interface to address the issues you encountered in part 1. You will apply the methods of scenario-based design that are discussed in the book, and you will implement a prototype that can be used in each of the scenarios. The deliverable for phase two is an HTML writeup on your group Web site linked to your main project page and a 20 minute demo to the professor and TA.
Initially, you should spend time thinking about the high-level issues that will affect your design. What functionality is necessary in your system? Consider all three levels of design: activity, information, and interaction. Think about different metaphors that you could leverage in your design, and consider technology issues that will impact your design. Your writeup should discuss the various options you considered and outline the reasons for making the choices that you did.
Develop interaction scenarios that examine the problems from various viewpoints and the solutions that you are developing. Focus on scenarios that include the most interesting and surprising design discussions. The scenarios that you develop should lead you to a set of claims that will address features of the activity design, information design, and interaction design.
Build a prototype that can be used in all of the scenarios that you developed. Your writeup should provide a detailed description of your new interface with a walkthrough of each scenario. Include screen shots of the important states in your system. Remember, the system does not have to be completely operational, but the interface should be (at least to the point where you can evaluate it). You can use any hardware and software that you want in building the prototype as long as you can demo the system to the professor and TA and you can test the system with real users.
In addition, provide a brief discussion of the evaluation you plan to conduct. If you plan to use questionnaires, list sample questions, if you plan to do usability tests, list sample tasks, and so on. Explain why you think each evaluation method as well as each question/task/etc is appropriate for your interface. This may change, but by this point should should be seriously considering these issues.
Your writeup should be a self-contained document: a person with no knowledge of your project should be able to read the document and understand the nature of your project. As a result, be sure you include a summary of part 1.
Part 3 of this project asks you to evaluate your new interface. You will need to conduct an experiment, analyze the results, and draw conclusions. The deliverable for phase three is a writeup in HTML to be placed in your group directory and linked in to your main project page. Your writeup should be a self-contained document: a person with no knowledge of your project should be able to read the document and understand the nature of your project. As a result, you will want to summarize your previous findings in this writeup.
Consider carefully the type of evaluation that is most appropriate for your interface. It may be a usability study with dozens of participants, or a more in-depth but longer term study with fewer participants. Explain why you think your evaluation method is appropriate. Discuss questions and tasks in the writeup, and include the full material in an appendix. Include the details of your study: if you used questionnaires, list the questions and discuss why you chose them (discuss the type and contents of the question), if you performed usability tests, discuss the subject pool, the dependent and independent variables, the hypothesis, your experimental design, and your evaluation methods, and so on.
Perform your evaluation and summarize your results. I expect your evaluation will generate both statistical data and user opinions from interviews and questionnaires. In presenting the results, use methods that are appropriate for the type of data: charts, graphs, tables, written summaries, and so forth. Include conclusions that can be drawn from the experiment and future work that should be done. Design is a continual process, and your experiment should yield good and bad about the interfaces. Be sure and discuss both, and look to the future to consider how your project impacts other work.
As discussed in class, when running an experiment you will have to prepare a consent form for your participants. A sample template form in MS Word and HTMLformat.
Your project presentations will consist of a 10 minute presentation of your work plus a 4 minute question period. Because of the large number of class groups, the time period will be rigidly enforced. Your presentation should address the interface that you developed, the experiment that you conducted, and your results and conclusions. One common error is to jump too quickly to your results without sufficiently motivating the problem!
I encourage you to prepare a Powerpoint presentation. Bring a copy to class on the day of the presentation, either on floppy, zip disk, or CD, if you want to use the projection system. Also, email me the presentations so I have them for the evaluation. You may also choose to bring your own laptop or use other equipment, but bring the connections necessary to hook it up to the display system. Let me know of other special needs that you have.