- Administrivia
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- Assignments
- Individual Project Proposal
- Design Assignment #1
- Group Brainstorm
- Design Assignment #2
- Contextual Inquiry
- Design Assignment #3
- Low-Fidelity Prototype
- Design Assignment #4
- Process Book
- Wiki
Assigned: February 18
Due: March 11 Before Class
Overview
The goal of this assignment is to learn how to use low-fidelity
prototyping in early stage design to present your ideas to
stakeholders and to receive feedback and refine your design. You will
first build a low-fi prototype and demonstrate how a user would
interact with your system through a video prototype. You will then
perform a simple usability test with the low-fi prototype. You will
incorporate the results of the test into design changes in your
prototype for the next assignment.
Grading:
This assignment is 10% of your overall grade, which has been broken
down into 75 points for grading. The breakdown of points is
discussed below.
What to Do:
In this assignment you will design a low-fidelity prototype to handle
three key tasks for your users, create a video prototype demonstrating
the intended interaction for those three tasks, and then test your
prototype design with a set of users.
Video Prototyping
There are a number of sources available to you to learn more about
creating video prototypes:
You may want to consider using the SAM Animation software to create your video prototypes. This software supports stop-motion video creation, which may be useful, especially if inter-cut with live action video. This software was used to create Nick's example video from CS 160 (linked above).
Testing Procedure
Have one of your teammates demo the system to show each real
participant how they would interact with your prototyped system to
complete a simple task (don't use one of your three tasks in this
initial explanation). Show participants how the system works in
general.
You should write up a script of your demonstration and follow the same script with each participant. Once you have shown participants the demo, explain the first task. Tell them what they must achieve, but do not explain how to perform the task. When they are finished, you will explain the next task and so on.
During the experiment, you should make a log of critical incidents (both positive and negative events). For example, the user might make a mistake or they might see something they like and say, "cool". Write it down along with a description of what was going on. Collect all the incidents first (all observers do this). Then go over them again as a group to assign severity ratings. The ratings scale looks like this:
Each participant should perform all 3 tasks. You will want to keep the data separate for each task and participant.
What to Turn In:
You will write-up a description of the work done for this assignment
and post it on the wiki. Your writeup should follow the outline below
and will be graded using the writing and experimentation guidelines
detailed below. You should also embed pictures of paper prototype and
link your video prototype.
Additional detail and a grading breakdown are given below:
Prototype (15 pts)
Describe your prototype. Reference sketches of the interface screens
in your description. Submit at least two images of your prototype
(ideally more): an image showing all of the components of your system
so that I can gauge the complexity of the prototype, and another image
showing the prototype in some valid state (such as in the middle of a
user study). You may also wish to reference the video prototype to
help describe your system.
Video Prototype (25 pts)
You will be graded on how well your video illustrates each of the
tasks and gives a flavor for your interface idea and how it will be
used. You should show your prototype being used for at least three
tasks, 1 easy, 1 moderate, and 1 hard. You will also be graded on
whether the video properly shows the context of how the interface will
be used (the back story). Finally, we will grade you on the
description of how you made the video and the critique
(positive/negative) of the technique.
Videos may be uploaded as files to the wiki or you may link to a video that you uploaded to a video hosting service, such as YouTube or Vimeo.
Experimental Method (10 pts)
Describe the participants in the experiment and how they were
selected. Also describe the testing environment and how the prototype
and any other equipment were set up. Describe some details of your
testing procedure. This should include the roles of each member of the
team. To prepare for the experiment, you should assign team members to
the different tasks (i.e., greeter, computer, facilitator, observer,
etc.) and practice with someone playing the participant. The test
measures detail what you looked for or measured during the
experiment. You should collect both qualitative and quantitative data
during your experiment, but you should concentrate on process data
(i.e., what is happening in the big picture). You should have
participants complete at least 3 tasks--1 easy, 1 moderate and 1
difficult--using your prototype.
Experiment Results (10 pts)
Summarize the results of the experiment from your data. Explain how
the users performed on each of the tasks (at least 1 easy, 1 moderate
and 1 difficult task).
Experiment Discussion (10 pts)
Discuss your results. What did you learn from the experiment? How will
the results change the design of your interface? Was there anything
that the experiment could not reveal?
Appendix (5 pts)
The appendix should include copies of all materials involved in the
experiment. This includes your consent form, demo script, and any
instructions or task descriptions you handed out or read out loud to
your participants. Finally, it should include all the raw data you
gathered during the experiment. Merge the critical incidents logged by
the observers and list them here. The appendix materials and
screenshots do not count in your 6-10 page total.
How to Turn In:
From your group page, create a new page for your Low Fidelity Prototype
assignment. You will probably want to call this page something like
"<GroupName>LowFidelityPrototype" to ensure that the page is unique.
Paste the text for your written report directly into your new page and
embed any images and videos that you may have.
Finally, link this new page to the Low Fidelity Prototype page. After adding an entry to the bulleted list on that page, link that entry to the unique name that you picked for your assignment page in the step above.