Project Requirements
The project will follow a Goal Directed Design (GDD) process as
described in class. This document describes:
Getting Started
Find a team. Send an email with: your team name, a brief description
of your project, and a list of team members.
The Design (36 points)
The design process will be divided into 3 steps. Although a few
activities (e.g., interviews) may be done individually, only one copy of the
design documents is needed per group. All submissions should be made
in a standard document format (e.g., .docx, .odt, .pdf) unless otherwise stated.
Design Step 1 (6 points)
This is the initial stage of your design. You may want to refer to:
Understanding Users.
Specific requirements:
- (3) Persona Hypothesis. The persona hypothesis determines the
potential users for your product. You may want to review the persona
hypothesis for the EECS website.
- (3) Interview questions. Come up with an intial list of interview
questions. Note that you should do a semi-structured interview, so you
will start with the interview questions, but should allow the
interview to follow any interesting remarks made by your interviewees.
Here are some examples from this year's projects:
- Bananagrams. Good persona hypothesis, nice
list of questions (except possibly the first one)
- Math Tutor. Good persona hypothesis, extensive
list of questions.
- Seating app. Good primary persona, good
list of questions.
- Hiker app. Good list of personas, detailed
plan for interview
- Recipe Planner. Very good persona
hypothesis.
Design Step 2 (14 points)
This continues the initial design, also from Understanding Users.
Specific requirements:
- (5) Interview answers. Each person should interview at least 2 potential users. All
answers should be collected into one document.
- (5) Ethnography OR market research. Depending on your product, you should either do
an ethnographic observartion or market research. For larger teams you may want to do
both (e.g., have 2 people do an ethnography, 2 do market research). If you do
an ethnographic observation, you should identify who you observed (general category,
e.g., two 261 students doing an assignment, not Jim and Sally), what
they were doing (e.g., completing a lab for 261), what you observed (see the
ethnographic examples in Understanding Users). If you do market research,
you should identify 1-2 products who would be competitors. If possible,
download a demo and spend some time evaluating. If there is no free demo,
review all the product literature you can find (and ideally review two
products rather than one, since you may not find that much info on a website).
- (2) Create a persona for your project
- (2) Determine your persona's expectations for your product.
Remember that this is not just a list
of tasks, it's the description of what the user expects the system to do for them (e.g.,
"I expect the system will help me develop an optimal schedule" rather than "I expect the system will
display a list of courses for me to choose from").
Design Step 3 (16 points)
During this step your design should start to take shape.
Your submission may include .ppt or
some other format for the visual design (but the grader should not
have to install software in order to grade your submission).
Specific requirements:
- (2) The team should have a brainstorming session. Submit your notes from the session.
- (12) Create use cases and the visual design for your system. Sketch all
major screens. A person reading your use cases and looking at the visual
design should have a really good idea of what the final program will look like
and how it will operate.
- (2) Project justification. Assessment can be difficult for open-ended projects. In
an effort to ensure all projects have sufficient depth and challenge, you will create
a justification for your project, as described below.
System Justification
The final program is worth 65 points. The rubric for the final program is:
- (5) Goals. Clearly identify the goals for your product. Why would
someone use it? What are they trying to acccomplish?
- (40) Functionality/features. Your program should include
significant functionality and challenge.
- (20) Adhere to UI principles. Your final program should adhere
to at least 10 principles discussed in class. These attributes
should not include obvious ideas that you would have known
before ever taking this class. For example, just saying your product
has plenty of white space is not sufficient (but combining white
space with other ideas from Don't Make Me Think, such as structuring
text and removing words, would be valid).
When you turn in your final product, you will also submit a document
that justifies the points. To ensure that your product has sufficient
depth, for now you will turn in a justification of just the
functionality/feature points. If you have 3 or more people,
your justification should list roughly what each person will be responsible
for. The purpose of this is to ensure that larger teams have correspondingly larger
requirements.
You may want to review this example
justification based on a project done in a previous semester. Note
that the rubric was different (fewer points for UI principles, included a
separate challenges area)
Bring a hard-copy of your justification to class.
Implementation
The system implementation component has 3 major milestones:
- Usability test 1. The team will demonstrate a working prototype of
the software to me.
- Usability test 2. You should do a second usability test with another
user. Based on the results, you may want to make
some changes to your software. The results of your tests will be submitted
on BB as described below.
- Final program. The final program will be turned in on CD and
presented to the class (see Presentations below).
Demo (5 points)
Each team must schedule a demo/usability test with me.
These demos will be
scheduled on Nov 19/20 if possible. Note that it's best if
all team members can attend, but if scheduling becomes an
issue we will waive that requirement.
The team should be prepared for me to do a think
aloud. That is, you should have a set of tasks for me
to complete. You should explain the purpose of the
think aloud, and treat me like a normal test user. Nothing
to submit, but you should address any concerns raised.
One member from each team should sign up on
this doodle.
System Usability Test (10 points)
You may want to refer to:
Usability testing notes.
Your usability report should include:
- (2) Clear description of the method you used (e.g., describe
what tasks you will use for a think-aloud, or if you did some other
type of test, such as an accuracy or timing test with some new
device)
- (2) Describe the usability test condition (e.g., number of users,
how close they are to your target audience, etc.).
- (6) Describe the results of the test (e.g., what issues did you uncover,
changes would you make to the system, what positive feedback did you receive,
etc.).
Submit your usability test on Blackboard.
Final Project (65 points)
Final projects will be presented the last week of class. Each
team should also submit a CD containing the project code and a text
file with brief instructions for using the product. NOTE: Most of
the grading will be done based on the presentation. I may not
require CDs for every project, please check with me.
You should submit your System Justification along with your
project. Update your system justification based on what you
actually accomplished. If you removed functionality, include
an explanation of why, including why your project functionality is
still worth 40 points. You should also very clearly state the UI
principles for your project. Please bring five
copies to the presentation (I will solicit other teams to help
critique). Provide detail - this is your
chance to justify your grade for the final project.
The Presentation(10 points)
This presentation consists of short demonstrations of the product,
along with discussion of: how this product adheres to good UI
principles, tools used, what was easy, what was difficult, lessons learned, etc.
Length: ~10 minutes (depends on the number of teams)
NOTE: Since we won't have much time, you should do most of your
discussion of how you adhere to UI principles while you
do your demo. You will probably have one slide with your team name,
one slide with the user goals for your system, then a demo. During
the demo you can talk about tools you used, what you had trouble with,
etc. as well what UI principles you followed. You may follow up with
one slide on usability results, or you may want to talk about
your usability results during the demo.
Tuesday December 4
- Don't Forget
- Prestige Worldwide
- More Than Just Riley
- Team Brazil
- WordWaffle
- West Side Shoppers
Thursday December 6
- MacLaren's
- Team Galaxy
- ;DROP TABLE teams;
- Shuffle Board
- M-Theory
- Algebra Problem Solver
Peer and Project Evaluations (5 points)
To ensure that all team members have contributed equitably, download
and fill out this Peer Evaluation
form. Submit the .doc file on Blackboard.