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 the design 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 your application.

Design process steps:

The project begins with forming a team by choosing a project and forming your team.
After forming your team, you will interview your scientist/client. From the information that you gathered from the interviews, your team will make a “team website” and design the interaction for the project.
Your team will receive an interaction and stakeholder analysis from the graduate student assigned to your team. You use these design documents to make a paper prototype for your app. Your team will present the paper prototype during the cognitive walkthrough.
The graduate students will perform a heuristic evaluation after your cognitive walkthrough. Using the results of the heuristic evaluation and feedback from your scientist, your team will refine the design of your web app. Your team will meet with me in the design review to present your refined design.
After beginning the implementation of your 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 your scientist and me separately to discuss your implementation and recommend design changes.

Team Coordination

The team size should be about 5 or 6 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 the graduate students as User Experience (UX) will assist with evaluating your design and discussing improvements.

While forming your team, 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 an 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 Meeting Documents

For team meetings to effective, meeting documents, including agenda and minutes, should be written and posted on the team websites.

Meeting Agenda

The meeting agenda is short documented written before the meeting listing the topics that will be discussed and decided during the team meetings. This documents allows all team members to prepare for the meeting. It should emailed via the team email list before the meeting. Post the meeting agenda on the website as an historical record of the purpose of the meeting.

Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes are written by the team. They are not individual note taking. They record who attended the meeting, what team member will do, what decisions where made, and what will be discussed in the next meeting. The outline of the meeting minutes is

Team Name
Date, time and duration of the meeting
Location or Medium of the meeting, for example “in-person at Reki 101” or by “Google Hangouts”
Attendance. List of people who attended the meeting. Indicate if a member is late or has an excused absences.
Action List. This a list that specifies tasks that team members will preform in the near future. Each item in the list should be a single line specify the member name and the task that the member will preform.
Discussions and Decisions. This is a list of topics that were discussed in the meeting and the decisions that where made. Each item of the list only needs to be a two sentence, one describing the discussion and the other the sentence giving the decision made.
Next Steps. This is a list of topics that will be discussed in the next meeting.

The meeting minutes is the product of the meeting, so they should be posted on the team website immediately after the meeting is adjourned.

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 UI 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 on your team website by the time of the due dates. 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 the links to these documents. Your website should have links to the graduate students’ documents.

I will read the reports online is your team website and write my evaluations in canvas so the entire team can read the evaluations.

Scientist/Client Communications

You will communicate with your scientists in three formats:

Meetings
Emails
Team website

Emails

You will email your scientist/client to arrange for meeting. These emails will generally be concise giving the purpose of the meeting and proposed dates. Scientists should respond in one business day. If the scientist does not respond in one day, email a reminder. This course has a tight schedule and we cannot delay. Likewise you should respond to the scientist’s email in one day.

You may also email your scientist/client to ask specific questions or get information. These emails and the scientist’s response should be saved in your team drive. They are important documents that you will need to reference later. Make a directory called “Scientist Email” and save a text copy of the email in that directory.

Meeting Notes

Your team should take notes during your meetings with your scientist. Transcribe and post the notes on your team websites. These notes are different from team minutes. The scientist meeting notes are for recording all that you learn from your meeting with your scientists. So you will try to record as much as you can during the meeting. See my lectures on interviewing for more details. I plan study the interaction between your team and your scientist. I plan to use your scientists meeting notes to learn the details of your interaction with your scientists. So, I request that your notes contain:

Team and Scientists Names
Date, time and duration of the meeting
Location or Medium of the meeting, for example “by Zoom” or “by Phone”
Attendance – list of team members and scientists present at the meeting.
Discussion items – list of items discussed with specifics about the topics.

Scientist meeting notes should be posted on the your team website immediately after the meeting

Class Email List

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

Team Project Assignment Pages