Assignment 8: Develop a “paper prototype” of the interface

Goal

The goal of this assignment is to fully design a prototype interface for your proposed technology, and to create materials to allow paper prototype testing of the idea. This will help your team progress from a high-level design to a detailed idea for an implementable prototype.  

Team assignment
 

Start by taking the feedback you have received into account. Refine your idea.

 

Now you must translate the big idea into a design for an actual prototype. You will focus on all stages of interaction with the user (or, for many ideas, users). You must define how the interaction with the technology will work.

 

Next, adapting the technique as required, develop a "paper prototype" for your prototype. This may be quite challenging, because in some cases ideas may not have traditional screen-based interfaces. Your goal is to achieve the spirit of what is described in the Rettig article in the reading. That is, you need to develop a way to test your system with potential users, before you have built the software. This might be via paper prototyping, Wizard-of-Oz, and/or other methods. You will almost certainly need to be creative in how you do this, because your technology is probably using a novel human-computer interface technology.

 

Using the tools you create, run some prototype sessions with your own team. Refine the materials. Make sure all parts of the system that a person interacts with are thought through and prototyped in some way. For example, if your system talks, you need to create prototypes of all the possible dialogue. Alternatively, if dialogue is generated automatically, you need to write down some general rules that would allow simulation of that output by a person, who is only using your rules. As you do this, you will likely identify challenges you had not thought of before. If the user sees a screen of any sort, that screen should be prototyped on paper.

 

Once you feel you have your materials developed well enough to allow you to do prototype sessions with people other than your team, go through an entire prototype session from start to end and record video of it (cell phone video is fine). You can do this with a team member as the user (ok), or with a friend you recruit who knows nothing about your project (better).

 

As you do the recorded run-through, make notes of what you learned both about how to do the rapid prototyping better, and also about how to improve your specific idea.

 

Hand-in:

 

Upload the video of your recorded test session to Google Drive and add the link to the video to your team's wiki by the deadline tagged with Assignment 8.

Bring all of the materials you need to run a session to class, and be prepared to run a new person through in class.

 

Evaluation/feedback:

 

This assignment will be graded based on how well it appears you have adapted rapid paper prototyping to advancing your project idea, and whether your team appears to be following the instructions in the Rettig article, to the extent possible.