The UC-HIPO project seeks to design user interfaces for the Instructor Portal of the UCWISE project. The current goal of the UC-HIPO project is to design a metadata tagging tool interface which will assist the UCWISE professors, instructors and TA's to tag their curriculum content with metadata. This tool will thus help facilitate fast and easy categorization, retrieval, reuse and sharing of information related to the curriculum and study material in the field of computer science and engineering.

The instructors and researchers in UCWISE appreciate the benefits of tagging their curriculum information with metadata and strongly feel the need to do so in some way. But the current metadata tagging interface for the UCWISE project has limited functionality. It is not user friendly which deters the instructors to tag curriculum content with metadata at all. Thus the challenge for us was to design a user interface which do not turn the users away with long lists of metadata to be filled, provides flexibility related to the metadata that the instructors want to fill, and in a subtle way trick the users to fill up the required metadata quickly without finding it to be an inconvenient experience.

To test the usefulness of our initial design, we carried out low-fi prototype usability testings. For this we created a paper based prototype of the metadata tagging tool interface. The advantages of using a paper based prototype are: quick to set up, flexible, could be easily modified to respond to users' feedback, and give the users a feeling that it is not permanent and final and thus encourages them to come up with ideas and critiques about the interface.