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.
Often non-profit websites cannot afford professional designers, and so the results of their design efforts can be lacking. Your job is to do some pro bono work for Cars 4 Causes, whose website is at: http://www.cars4causes.net/ . Do your analysis on the Home page, the How To Donate page, the Donation form page, and at least two other pages.
As part of your evaluation, for each page 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 on the page. 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.
More specifically, for each problem, show the following:
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.
(Note: You won't know how to do this question until after the lectures on March 14 and 16.)
You've been hired by East Bay MUD to help with the design of a handheld device for keeping track of water usage by residents. Currently the inspector goes to each home once a month, looks at the reading on the meter outside the house, and records the reading on a piece of paper on a clipboard. Later this information is entered into a computer by a different office worker.
EBMUD wants to move to handheld devices, but also wants to save money. They are deciding between black-and-white versus color screens, and between one that uses a stylus for data entry versus one with a small keypad.
Your job is to design a formal experiment to help decide which type of device to buy for the fleet.
You don't want to expend a huge budget for this experiment; if things go well, you'll do a larger study. Thus you will limit this study to 32 participants. Fill in the following information: