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The following assignments are to be completed by teams and posted to your team web page by the start of class on the week due.
Team Project
Assignment #1 Find a Team, Find a Project (3 weeks) The heart of this course is a semester-long project, in
which you will design, implement, and evaluate a user interface. User
interface design is an iterative process, so you will build your UI not just
once, but four times, as successively higher-fidelity and more complete
prototypes. In order to have time for these iterations, we need to get
started on the project as early as possible. Project teams may consist of 2-4 people. Teams will
primarily be formed based on the results on the first brainstorming
exercise and in-class discussion. You can also use the Directory or informal networking to find teammates.
Ensure that at least one person on your team has solid programming skills,
preferably in Java. One member of the team should set up a team web page on
which you will post the results of team assignments. Ensure the names and
email addresses of the team members are at the top of the page and post it to
a server. Organize the page so the instructors can quickly find your
assignments each week. Email the names of the team members, a name for your
team and a URL to the team web page to cs5340@ccs.neu.edu.
Group projects will involve the design of health education interfaces for older adults users, to be deployed on a touch screen kiosk in the GAP waiting room. We will provide a group of older adults who will be available for testing your interface at the end of the semester.
Here are some guidelines to help you develop your
project proposal. Your project must have a substantial user
interface. A health screening system that simply administers a questionnaire
is not enough. The user interface must be interactive. A patient
education system that simply displays a page of text or sequences through a
series of pages would not be acceptable. Creative, original projects are preferred
(within the constraints provided). Scan the bibliography
of HCI for older adults and the list of research
papers for ideas. Your project should be fully implementable by the end
of the semester, although we will consider larger projects in which you
primarily develop the interface and leave some implementation details for
later. You can implement your interface in any language you like using any UI
toolkit you like (including none), but it must run on garden variety PCs and
the teaching staff may not be able to help you if you pick something too
esoteric. What
to Post Your proposal should be about a page long, and include
the following parts: 1. Problem. Describe
the problem you chose and how the system will help users. 2. Target users. Characterize
the user population. 3. Solution. Describe
a possible solution to the problem --- i.e., the interface that you envision,
and how it will address the problem. You aren't absolutely committed to your
solution, since you may find after building and evaluating some prototypes that
a wholly different solution will work better. |
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Team Project
Assignment #2 Task Analysis (1 week) In this team assignment, you will start the design of your term project by doing the following:
User analysis. Identify the characteristics of your user population, as we discussed in lecture. If you have multiple user classes, identify each one. Identify all stakeholders in your application.
Task analysis. Determine the tasks of the problem you've chosen, analyze their characteristics, and answer the general questions about tasks we asked in lecture. Think about other questions you should ask that might be relevant to your particular domain. You should find and analyze at least 6 tasks. If you can't find that many tasks in your problem, try drilling down to more specific tasks, and consider exceptional and emergency tasks.
What to Post. Your report should be around 4 pages long. Include the following parts:
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Team Project
Assignment #3 Activity Design (1 week) In this team assignment, you will continue the design of your term project by exploring possible interaction metaphors.
Metaphors Make a list of possible interaction metaphors for your interface, following the examples in Rosson & Carroll Ch 3, Tables 3.1 and 3.2. For each of your scenarios list at least two options for interaction metaphors and some of their implications.
Activity Design Scenarios Transform each of your problem scenarios into an activity design scenario, documenting analyses of design features, following the examples in Rosson & Carroll Ch 3, Figures 3.4 and 3.5, and Table 3.3.
What to Post. Your report should include three detailed activity scenarios and a pro/con analysis of at least six design features.
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Team Project
Assignment #4 Design Sketches (1 week) In this team assignment, you will continue the design of your term project by exploring possible design options. Interaction Scenarios Expand each of your activity design scenarios into full interaction scenarios, indicating what the user perceives and the actions he/she performs at each major step in the scenario, following the methods outlined in Rosson & Carroll Ch 4 & 5. Identify and document at least two special considerations for older adults (e.g., citing Hawthorne).
Preliminary interface design. Refine your interaction scenarios into a preliminary design. A preliminary design consists of one or more sketched windows or dialog boxes, along with the menus and controls that the user manipulates. Storyboards. For each of your scenarios, describe how your preliminary interface would be used to perform the task. Use rough sketches to illustrate how the interface would look at important points in the task.
Take a little time now to brainstorm a variety of different interface designs, sketching them by hand on paper or a whiteboard. Then choose one that seems the most promising, or a combination of them, to hand in. When you draw your sketches, don't get bogged down in details like wording, icon appearance, or layout. Keep things simple. Focus on the model you're trying to communicate to the user, and think about your task analysis: what the user needs to do and how they can do it. Putting too much time into low-level details is pointless if big things have to change on the next design iteration. Hand-drawn sketches are encouraged.
What to Post. Include the following parts in your report:
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Team Project
Assignment #5 Paper Prototyping (1 week) In this team assignment, you will do your first implementation of your term project, which will be a paper prototype. Your paper prototype should be able to handle at least 3 scenarios. These scenarios may be the scenarios you described in T4; alternatively, you may want to choose different scenarios that explore the riskiest parts of your interface, which are the ones that will provide the most payoff from prototyping. You will test your paper prototypes on at least 3 users, TBD.
What to Prepare Before testing your prototype, you should:
Testing Users When you run your prototype on a user, you should do the following things:
What to Post You should post a report with the following parts:
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Team Project Assignment
#6 Computer Prototyping (2 weeks) In this group assignment, you will do the first computer-based implementation of your term project.
Your computer prototype should be:
Here are some issues you should not worry about in this prototype:
After you hand in your prototype, it will be distributed to at least two of your classmates, who will do heuristic evaluations of it for individual homework I8 and give their reports back to you. Since your evaluators must be able to view and interact with your prototype, this puts some constraints on how you implement your prototype. If at all possible, implement your prototype as a Java applet that can be deployed off of your project web page. You can require evaluators to use a particular web browser and platform to ensure the correct appearance and operation of your prototype, as long as the browser is commonly available in one of the CCIS labs. If your prototype is unable to work under these constraints, talk to the instructor.
What to Post You should create a separate web page for your evaluators (linked to your project web page, of course) with the following information on it:
Hint: You might
think about getting a start on the project report at this point, see T9
below.
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Team Project Assignment
#7 Heuristic Evaluation & Prototype Revision #1 (2 weeks) At this point you will have approximately one week before you receive heuristic evaluations from your classmates. During this time you can continue implementing the back end of your system, but should not make any major changes to the UI. After you receive the heuristic evaluations you should assign each of these problems a severity rating (cosmetic, minor, major, catastrophic), and brainstorm possible solutions for it. Modify your system to correct as many of the problems found as possible (in priority order), documenting how you do this. What to Post A link to your updated prototype and the report describing how you responded to the heuristic evaluations. |
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Team Project Assignment
#8 User Testing & Prototype Revision #2 (1 week) In this final group assignment, you will complete enough of the implementation to support user testing, conduct a user test of your interface, and write up the final results of the project.
User Testing You will conduct user testing of your system. Prepare a briefing and three tasks. These may be the same ones that you used in paper prototyping, but you may want to improve them based on feedback from the paper prototyping. You may, if you wish, also prepare a short demo of your interface that you can use to show your users the purpose of the system. The demo should be scripted, so that you do and say the same things for each user. It should use a concrete example task, but the example task should be sufficiently different from the test tasks to avoid bias. The demo option is offered because some interfaces are learned primarily by watching someone else use the interface. Think carefully about whether your interface is in this category before you decide to use a demo, because the demo will cost you information. Once you've demonstrated how to use a feature, you forfeit the chance to observe how the user would have used it otherwise. Pilot test your briefing, demo, and tasks, before the user test session. Use another group member or another member of the class for your pilot testing.
Conduct a formative evaluation with each user:
Redesign Collect the usability problems found by your user tests into a list. Assign each problem a severity rating (as in T7 above), and brainstorm possible solutions for the problems. Then, fix your implementation to solve as many problems as you can in the time available, giving priority to severe problems.
On 12/16 your team will give a 20 minute presentation of your project. This talk should include the following:
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Final Report What to Post Your final project report should contain the following:
Your report should be 8 pages long, following the CHI long paper format. Post a PDF if
possible. |