SIMS 213 Individual Assignment

Assignment: Individual Assignment

SIMS 213, Spring 2005

Due on Tuesday, March 15

Instructions

Feel free to use html, Word, pdf, etc., but have it all online. For all sketches for all parts of this assignment, please take a digital photo and put it in your writeup.

Although heuristic evaluation is usually done in a team, I want you to get practice on your own and I want to see your individual work. So please do all the work in this assignment on your own, although you are free to discuss it with other students.

Question 1: Heuristic Evaluation

Introduction

The purpose of this question is to give you practice in critiquing existing interface designs, using the heuristic evaluation technique.

I have prepared a sequence of numbered screenshots of a user interface for assigning and monitoring reviewers of manuscripts submitted to research journals. I've annotated the screenshots with information about how the interface works.

This is an interface that I use frequently, usually several times per week. I'll show my cards here and let you know that I think there are significant usability problems with this interface. I am actually hoping that some of your critiques will be done so well that I can use them as feedback to send to the system administrators to help them improve it. (However, I will ask before showing anyone's work to anyone outside the class.)

The goal of the interface is to support the paper reviewing process. An author or set of authors writes a paper, and then uses the system to submit the paper to a journal (the site supports a large number of journals). The head editor for the journal then assigns the paper to a member of the editorial board, known as an associate editor (AE). The associate editor in turn looks at the paper and tries to think of researchers who are uniquely qualified to review the paper. This is a time-consuming process that usually involves web searches and other mechanisms -- don't worry about this part for your analysis. When the associate editor has decided on a potential reviewer, s/he uses the system to send an email letter to the person in question. (This is equivalent to a cold call.) The candidate reviewer (eventually) sends email back to the AE stating if they accept or decline the invitation. If they decline, the AE removes them from the paper's reviewer list. If they accept, the AE uses the system to send the reviewer information about how they can access the paper and enter their reviews. The system sends periodic reminder emails to the reviewers. When all the reviews are in, the AE makes an accept/reject decision and notifies the author(s).

Screenshots in html
Screenshots in powerpoint (2.8M)

The Heuristic Evaluation

As part of your evaluation, I'd like you, for each screenshot, to describe at a high level what is problematic about the design. You should couch this discussion in terms of the task(s) the user is trying to accomplish at this stage of usage. By problematic, I mean design choices that are potentially confusing, that go counter to expectations and/or conventions, or that are unnecessarily complex or cumbersome to execute. This description should occupy about a paragraph for each screenshot.

Next, describe the contents of the screenshot in terms of violated heuristics. Label each violation with the HE name and rule number using Nielsen's (or some other set of) heuristics.

A nice version of Nielsen's heuristics (http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html)

More specifically, for each problem, show the following:

Which guideline is violated.
Why (briefly -- no more than a few sentences) you think this guideline is violated.
A severity rating for the violation.

(Optional Extra Credit) Redesign the Interface

As optional extra credit, after you're done with the HE, I'd like for you to sketch out a redesign for the functions covered in my annotations describing the site. There is no need for you to cover the functions that I do not highlight (e.g., no need to cover designing viewing a review's contents). To do this, please do the following:

Describe your design strategy in a paragraph or two.
Sketch an interaction flow for the functionality in question. You can use any of the flow diagramming methods we've used in class/assignments. You can sketch this by hand.
Sketch out three screens that cover some subset of the functionality of the design. You can select which parts of the functionality you are covering. Please indicate clearly which parts of the functionality your screens cover and which parts of your flow diagram they encompass. (If you want to do more than 3 screens, that is ok but not required.)

Question 2: Cognitive Considerations in Tandem with a Redesign

Please redesign the lights for room 202 South Hall using cognitive principles. The only constraints on your design are that (1) you cannot change the controls of the lights themselves, only the interface and (2) you have to allow for two sets of controls: one for the front and one for the back of the room. I'd like your design to support a persona consisting of a new PhD recipient interviewing for a faculty job in room 202. This person has to adjust the lights to give their presentation, and they do not want to look foolish fumbling around with the lighting. They want to turn the lights up after they finish with their powerpoint presentation in order to be visible when answering questions.

As a reminder, there are three sets of controls for the lights. One set turns on/off the lights in the top of the ceiling. The second and third set turns on/off lights embedded in the moulding high up on the wall. These lights alternate. That is, if you went around the perimeter of the moulding, you could label the lights A B A B A B ... One control turns on/off the A's, and the other the B's. All three sets of lights have dimmer capability as well (meaning their brightness can be adjusted between being all the way off, to slightly bright, to full brightness, with continuous values in between). Please ignore the whiteboard lights from this assignment.

For this design problem, I would like you to pay special attention to affordances, mental models, transfer effects, and mappings. Please describe your design in words and pictures and then describe how your design takes these concepts into account.