Group Project: Interface Design Outline Quick access to the sections of this document: Project Report Book Part 0 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Project Presentation Project Overview Drawing Editor This term you will undertake a group project (maximum 4 people) to evaluate how people use drawing tools to express and compare geomtric concepts to develop interface design alternatives for this task/problem, to implement a prototype of your design, and to evaluate your design. This project should provide you with hands-on experience with the tasks that interface designers face every day. Most importantly, the topic of the project is a real-world problem that matters to some individuals. Each project group will be graded as a team, with a significant adjustment per team member based on their contribution. At the end of term I will ask every team member for a statement of contribution for themselves and all team members. Lack of participation will result in an reduction of grade. Within the team, you must negotiate on how much and what each person will contribute. It is in your best interests to contribute as much as possible. 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. Project Report Book Each part of the project will include a deliverable report. This report will be handed in on paper. Each team should have a "home" page which includes: a brief (paragraph) description of your approach to the image viewer task(s) the team members Links to auxiliary material for project parts 1-4 (no report is needed for part 0). The format of the reports for the individual parts is up to you, but it should be professionally prepared, expressive, grammatically sound, illustrative of your efforts and process, and easy to understand. A good design effort can easily be hampered by a poor communication of what was done. You can put this on http://fraser.sfu.ca/~YourSFUID by ftp to fraser.sfu.ca. Part 0 - Team Due January 24 This first part of the project is relatively simple. You must list the members of your team. You should also identify one person who will be the owner of any project web pages you may wish to have (will own the files). Part 1 - Understanding the Problem Due January 31 in drop box The key goal of this first substantive part of the project is to deeply understand that problem that you are addressing, its set of pertinent users, and the issues and constraints that are involved in the problem. If the task has an existing system/interface, you should perform an interpretive evaluation of that system to help you learn more about it. Most important is identify important characteristics of the problem that will influence your subsequent design. In class we will discuss different techniques for acquiring this kind of information. Feel free to utilize the techniques that you feel are most appropriate to the particular task you are examining. Your report and deliverable for this part should deeply examine the problem of study. Who are the potential users? What tasks do they seek to perform? What functionality should the system provide? Basically, you are setting up a set of constraints for your subsequent design. What criteria should be used to judge if your design is a success or not? More specifically, you should develop the following items in this part, and you should communicate them through your report: An overview of what the system will do and why it's needed. A description of the important characteristics of the users of the system. A description of the important characteristics of the tasks performed by users. A description of important characteristics of the task environment. A simple task analysis of the problem. An interpretive evaluation (eg., heuristic evaluation, walkthrough, etc.) of existing systems. A description and justification of how the above information was gathered. Part 2 - Design Alternatives Poster Sessions February 10 + 11 in Your Lab Report Due Febraury 22 in Drop Box The key goal of part 2 of the project is to use the knowledge gained in part 1, as well as that from class, to develop a set of design alternatives for your problem. Further, you must provide a set of initial usability specifications for your system and a plan for usability testing of it. In this part of the project you only need to provide mock-ups, storyboards, and sketches of your interface designs. That is, you should provide pencil-and-paper or electronic images of the interface at various stages; You do not need to build a working prototype. Your design sketches should be sufficiently detailed for a potential user to provide useful feedback about the design, however. Along with your design mock-ups, you should provide a brief narrative walk-through of how the system will work. Perhaps most importantly, you should also include your justifications for why design decisions were made, and what you consider to be the realtive strengths and weaknesses of your different designs. Accompanying your designs should be a set of usability specifications for the system. What are your objectives through the design? For example, if you are working on a calendar manager, you might specify time limits in which you expect a user to be able to schedule or modify an appointment, or a maximum number of errors that you expect to occur. Basically, you should list a set of criteria by which your interface can be evaluated. Finally, this part of the project should include an initial evaluation plan for the system. Suppose that your interface is implemented through a prototype. What kinds of benchmark tasks would you have users perform to help evaluate the interface? What kind of subjective questionnaire would you deploy to have a user critique the interface? You will need to actually carry out some of this evaluation in part 4, so you should do your best to set it up now. Your project report should include all the explanatory material mentioned above as well as all the design sketches, drafts, storyboards, etc., that you generated. If some of your sketches are on paper, we will provide you with access to a scanner to scan in these images. Make sure that your report adequately reflects the design process that your group undertook. We will use one full Lab day as a poster session at the end of this part of the project. Each group will post some of their design ideas on a poster in the Lab. Everyone will then circulate and interact with the designers. The idea here is that each group can use this opportunity to get feedback about their design ideas and to iteratively refine their design as they head into part 3 of the project. Part 3 - System Prototype Due March 17 In part 3 of the project, your group will implement a working system prototype of your interface. I recommend you build this using Processing. You should be able to get much of the interface functionality working, but clearly you will not be able to implement all back-end application functionality. You should be able to build and connect to enough of the application functionality to be able to conduct an initial usability evaluation with the benchmark tasks you proposed in the previous part. Your write-up for this part should include a description of your system prototype. You can include screen dumps to help explain it and text to describe how a user would interact with it. Discuss the implementation challenges you faced. Were their aspects that you wanted to build but were unable to do so? After this part is complete, each group will demo their system for the professor and/or the TA. Demos take place in Lab time Part 4 - Interface Evaluation Due April 7 In the final part of the project, your group will conduct a usability evaluation of it. Presumably, you will utilize some of the evaluation measures that you identified in part 2. We expect that you will conduct formal experiments on your system with sample users. These users will probably be your client(s) and maybe other students from class or other people who would fit your target user population. Give the users a few simple benchmark tasks and have them interact with your interface. Closely study what occurs. Deploy a questionnaire to get their subjective feedback about the interface and interaction. Your write-up for this part should include a description of your usability study and its results. Explain why you chose the benchmark tasks that you did. Why did you ask users what you asked? What conclusions can you draw from the studies? What aspects of your design "worked" and what failed to meet your specifications? If you had more time to work on the design, what would you now change and improve? Remember, no designer ever gets a system "just right." We will reward teams who honestly and carefully assess their design and who clearly provide a plan for its improvement. Personal Contribution Writeup In addition to the group paper, each team member must separately turn in one page describing that person's individual contribution. We are primarily interested in a detailed description of which parts of the code and game design you were responsible for, but you may also mention if you had primary responsibility for a particular group task such as writing the project proposal. Numbers Each group member must also distribute 100 points among the members of your group, including yourself. The number you assign to a member is an assessment of the quality and quantity of their work. More points = better work/more work. You must hand out all 100 points. Groups that function well most likely have an even distribution. You can put this report in a sealed envelope if you like. You must each include your rating with the final group report. Project Presentation April 7 In Class -- Allow 3 hours. The design project will culminate in a session in which each group presents their system to the class. Each group will be expected to give a professional 10 minute summary and walk-through of their design and prototype. It is important that you do a good job communicating all your efforts for the term. You want to make sure that your objectives in the project are discussed, your system is clearly presented, and that your design process is communicated. Also describe what you learned from your usability study. Practice your presentation! Ten minutes is not long - plan accordingly.