The course project is a group exercise intended to
give you hands-on experience in task and user-centered design,
prototyping, evaluation, redesign, and implementation. You will
begin, in this first team project deliverable, by proposing an
idea that will form the basis of your course project. In
subsequent stages of the project you will perform a task analysis,
followed by low-fidelity prototyping, a cognitive walkthrough, a
heuristic evaluation, and rough usability studies, ending with a
high-fidelity prototype that will be more rigorously user tested.
Team projects will be done in groups of 5 students. If you are in a group of four or
less, we will randomly assign you to groups to balance to get as
many groups of 5 possible.
Assignment 2 requires you to propose the idea that will
form the basis of your group project. We have three recommended
project topics, though, if you have a good idea, your project idea
can come from or be inspired by any of the posted Pre-Proposals
from a member of your group. You will need to confirm with
the instructor though if you choose to do your own project since
we want to make sure that it has a good scope for the limitations
of the class. You should focus on improving or creating the
interface of a specific tool, application or service. Just as in
Assignment 1, the more specific you get, the more likely you will
be able to design, prototype, and evaluate the user interface for
your project within the course timeframe. Remember also that your
focus should be on design of your interactive system's interface,
not on implementation of
the underlying system.
You are not strictly limited to any particular technology
platform, language, or development tool. You are encouraged to
think "out-of-the-box" and include new or different interaction
techniques and technology platforms (e.g., mobile devices,
automobile, in-the-home interfaces, etc.). Do not rule these out
through a concern of prototyping a physical object. There are many
ways to prototype the key interface aspects of almost any
application that are completely within your capability. For
example, a 'functional' mockup of a revised cell phone interface
could consist of a Visual Basic or Powerpoint program that shows
an image of the device, and is interacted with by pushing pictures
of buttons with the mouse; whereas a 'shape mockup' made out of
carved foam, double-stick tape and printed paper might address
concerns about the shape, size and location of buttons and screen
elements. The key at this stage is to isolate the questions that
need to be addressed and then prototype and evaluate them
individually. You can go a long way with this approach.
TOPICS FOR PROJECTS
Here are project topic areas ideas:
Note: the designs of these interfaces and conceptual models will depend upon your users and stakeholders which is main goal of the project.
Note that a constraint on your project topic is that
you will have to involve representative users in both the design
and evaluation stages. For ethics reasons (which you will learn
about in this class), you may only recruit people who you or one
of your team members knows personally - a friend, a classmate, an
acquaintance, or a family member. You may only recruit people who
are 18 years of age or older. Assume that you will require a
minimum of 10 representative users over the course of this
project. (The one exception is that if you work with a
difficult-to-recruit population such as visually impaired users,
you will be required to involve fewer than 10 users.)
Therefore, select a project topic and target user group for which
your team is confident of its ability to recruit users.
For your course project, we will plan to have mostly
classmates as much as possible be your users for testing purposes.
Thus, for example, you will be a participant in two other groups'
experiments while you will have two other groups be participants
in your experiments. If your user demographic is very different
than your classmates, then, you will have to have an alternative
plan for recruiting. This will need to be discussed with the
instructor.
Whether or not you use them for project ideas, make good use of the Solo Assignments as well as mailing list to help identify compatible team members.
Be aware of your group's skills and limitations when
considering topics. Use the AB team charter form and Psychological
Safety Team Charter to assist with this. Paul Lusina has
prepared some excellent videos to help you with team formation and
the charter. These are for the Capstone projects, but apply well
to our course projects too.
Also be sure you know and have the appropriate tools to do the job. Note that the focus here is on the user interface and not all the other technological pieces that would be required to really get some of these projects working in the real world (some backend functionality is needed so that you can appropriately evaluate your system, but the whole system does not have to be "production ready").
Team names and team charter will be due by the START
(very important) of the 3rd class which is one week after
Assignment 2 is assigned and after the course drop date; see schedule for exact date.
(a) By the start of class, you need to:
The team title page and charter should be appended
together into one single pdf document for hand in.
Write a document of no more than 3 pages
of single spaced 12 point text, with 1" margins. Up to 2 additional pages may be
added at the end of the text for figures and diagrams. On the
cover page (not included in the page count) you must list the
name of your group, the members' names and photos of all team
members (or 1 photo including all of you, identified).
Your proposal should address the following broad issues:
1. problem definition (including 1 line problem statement)
2. analysis
3. suggested improvements and what you intend to do
Here are some guidelines on writing this proposal:
The problem description should be short and specific about the high-level goals of the project. It must:
As part of the problem definition, you should include a one-line
problem statement to capture the highest level of what you are
solving.
You should cite any sources that you have used (e.g., for quotes, general reference, or images), including books, magazines, journals, and URLs. Any clear, professional citation style is acceptable, e.g., APA style.
2a. For your team list only one member of your team needs to submit the list as a pdf file.
2b. For your TCPS2
certificate and Adherence form, these must be compiled into a
single pdf document for hand in.
2c. For your proposal, it must be submitted according to the deadline listed on the schedule page.
Only one proposal per team
should be submitted. Choose one team member to submit the proposal
for your group.
Submit your proposal as a PDF
document (only PDF will be accepted for this assignment).
You will be marked on the basis of:
a penalty will be assessed: