Project | CS4760 & CS5760: Human-Computer Interactions & Usability

The user interface (UI) project is a semester long team project designing and implementing an Web Application.

Designing

You and your team will learn a design process. The design process will involve several design changes, in other word it will evolve as your team improves the design. You will implement enough of the design so that graduate students can design a usability test and assist you in the testing.

Design process steps:

The project begins with forming your team and selecting potential applications (apps) to design. I will assign the apps to the teams based on your preference.
After receiving your app assignment, your team will meet with the scientist. From information that you gather from the interviews with the scientist, your team will make a website and design the interaction.
Your team will receive an interaction and stakeholder analysis from the graduate student. You use these design documents and your interaction design documents to make paper prototypes for your app. Your team will present the paper prototype during the walkthrough.
The graduate students will send your team a heuristic evaluation after the walkthrough. Using the results of the heuristic evaluation, your team will refine the paper prototype. Your team will meet with me in the design review to present your refined design.
After beginning the implementation of the app design, your team will present to the class your final design. This is another walkthrough, which the class on the whole can delineate potential usability problems.
Finally, after helping the grad students conduct the usability tests, your team will meet with me to discuss your implementation and recommend design changes.

Team Coordination

The team size should be about 4 or 5 CS students. CS students work as a team to plan and design the apps, After designing the app, the CS undergraduate students will primarily be responsible for implementing the app.

While choosing teams consider schedules, jobs, where prospective members live and work, and anything else that might impact how well the team will function. You should schedule meetings well in advance to ensure participation of all team members. During your meetings, take notes on your design decisions and how you reached your decision, so that you can use the notes in preparing your reports.

This project is a team activity. When you send e-mail to me about your project send it from your team email list and copy the list so that all team members will receive my reply and the original email.

Try to divide the project among team members so that every member of the team has experience in each phase of this process.

Team Directory and Website

Website

Your group directory will have a www subdirectory, which will contain your home page and design documents. I expected you to maintain a website in the directory. Please do not redirect the browser to another directory or server. Place all your documents in this directory or subdirectories.

The web pages and design documents should be readable by the public. Each team is responsible for maintaining and designing their web pages. Recall that this is a HCI course, so although I do not expect elaborate websites, I do expect clear and well organized websites. The web site design and implementation will be part of your project grade.

Reports and Presentations

All reports and presentations are to be posted online by the time of the due dates and with links to them in your website. Your design documents should be in a format that is readable by any web browser. Figures should be pasted in the documents; they need not need to be elaborately drawn. During the semester, Graduate students will write supporting documents for your project. The graduate students will give your team links to these documents. Your website should have links to the graduate students’ documents.

I will read the reports online and write a text file with my evaluations and email the entire team the evaluations.

Log File

The team website home page should include a link to a log file which all team members log their contributions at the time of their work. The log file will contain lines in the following format:

I will read the log file from time to time

Notes

During the interviews with scientists, among yourselves, or with me, the team members should record notes of the interviews or meetings. The notes should be posted on the website. The resource directory on this website has a from

PostMeetingForm.docx

that you should use to record your notes about the meeting.

Emailing

I will use the class email list to announce the order of presentation, so be sure that you are getting the class emails.

Some assignments instruct you to send me an email. When you send the email use the subject line specified in the assignment, so I will be assured to recognize your email as a course correspondence. To be sure that you receive full credit for the assignment, send your email to me early.