Assignment 5Revised Interface Design
After interviewing multiple faculty members about the process of completing the publications portion of the Bio-Bib, we assessed a need to further limit our scope to the “publications” section. The primary reason for this change was because we found that we needed to use card-sort methods and conduct more extensive interviews to fully understand the variance in publication types and terminology used by professors. Because of this change in scope, we also thought it was important to revise both our primary persona and our scenarios in order to focus primarily on the publications portion of the Bio-Bib.
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Lo-Fi Testing Changes
We gathered valuable feedback from faculty from the following fields in order to inform changes to our paper and low-fi prototypes:
- Professors from Art Practice, Psychology, and Law,
- Designates from Law
- Chairs from the Music, Drama, and Law departments
Based on the feedback that we received, we determined that three main changes needed to be made to our design. First and foremost, we decided to have an open citation field in which professors could cut and paste full citations from their CV or alternate documents. Initially, we had designed for multiple, parsed fields for authors, journal titles, journal names, year, etc. Upon testing our low-fi prototype; however, we found that typing this information in piece by piece was extremely tedious. In allowing professors to cut and paste entire citations into the Bio-Bib, we built functionality around parsing the citations on the back-end, based on the citation style that was used.
We also realized that we needed to expand the list of publications types presented to professors. Our initial design had included only academic publications such as journal articles, books, and technical reports. After talking with diverse faculty, we realized that we needed to add options such as musical recordings and scores, conference and symposium proceedings, reviews for different types of publications, and program notes.
The third main change to our prototype was in providing a “preview” button after entering publication information, and showing participants a preview of exactly what the citation would look like in the Bio-Bib. In testing our prototypes, we received feedback from multiple sources indicating that users expected a preview before submitting information into the Bio-Bib. Thus, we included a preview button, which leads to a preview page that allows users to either submit or edit the information after viewing it.
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Revised Personas
We chose to preserve Allison Randall as our primary persona because we still wanted to be able to support the needs of professors in non-traditional fields; however, we wanted to revise her persona in order to reflect the different types of publications she might need to record:
Allison Randall is a 37-year-old Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at UC Berkeley. Her husband is 39 and serves as an editor for Sunset Magazine (a West-coast lifestyle publication). He travels frequently. As they both approach 40, they have decided that now is the time to finally start a family.
Allison next personnel review could promote her to a full professorship. She is adamant that she must secure this job security before they have their first child. Although she used to accompany her husband on many of his trips, she has chosen to limit these in order to focus on her professional activities.
Much of Allison’s time is spent working on a book about 19th century European playwrights. She has been writing this book for the last three years, and is finishing up the last chapters. She hopes that the publication of this book will earn her a fully tenured position at Berkeley and solidify her national recognition within the Dramatic Arts community.
Allison is also very involved in the local arts community. Recently, she was asked to write the program notes for a new play in San Francisco. Because this is both a published work and a high honor in her field, she wants her professional efforts to be recognized.
- Attain full professorship so she and her husband can begin having children.
- Clearly establish scholarly credibility by publishing her book.
- Clearly illustrate her various publications over the last three years.
- Pursue validity of her accomplishments.
Justification:
Allison reflects several distinct issues facing certain professors: she is still vying for tenure and must reflect herself well to attain it; she works in the arts and needs her creative work to be validated and viewed as significant; her field respects books more than publications but these require much longer to produce; she has book that is considered 'in press' but can not be claimed as published within her reporting period.
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Revised Scenarios
The following scenarios were revised based on the changes to our project scope. Although we limited our scope to just the publications portion of the Bio-Bib, we also wanted to build functionality around logging into the system, starting a new Bio-Bib, and editing a previously saved draft
Scenario #1: Starting a New Bio-Bib
Allison Randall has just been asked by the chair of her department to complete her Bio-Bib for the 2004-2005 reporting period. Although she has completed the Bio-Bib a number of times using a word document template, she has decided that she would like to complete the form online this year, using the new FASTr Bio-Bib system she has heard about. She opens the email from the department secretary that contains website address to the online system, and clicks on the link.
Scenario #2: Editing a Previously Saved Draft
Jennifer Williams-Ortiz started her Bio-Bib last week for the 2005-2006 reporting period, beginning with the teaching and research portions of the report. Before she had time to complete the publications section, she had to run to a series of meetings. Now that she has a couple hours to commit to finishing her report, she wants to log back into the FASTr Bio-Bib system to continue working on her 2005-2006 report.
Scenario #3: Reporting a Non-traditional Publication
Given her expertise, the highly recognized American Conservatory Theater has just asked Allison to write the program notes for a Henrik Ibsen play. As high an honor as this is, Allison needs to ensure that writing the notes will not detract from her attaining tenure. Allison is reviewing her Bio-Bib to see whether this will strengthen her effort; she needs to clearly see that writing these program notes for a distinguished play would display itself prominently in her Bio-Bib.
Scenario #4: Reporting a non-published work
Allison has been working on her book of 19th century playwrights for three years. She has a signed contract with a publisher and it is due for release on September 15. She has twelve complete chapters that have already been copy-edited by the publisher; all she has left is the conclusion and introduction—these will not be complete before the end of the academic year. Completion of this book will validate her credibility and status in the dramatic art community. It is much more prestigious than journal articles in this field. In her Bio-Bib, Allison must reflect her extensive effort and quasi-completion of a book that will be neither formally complete nor formally published until after her Bio-Bib report is due. The book has a promised publication date and its completion is—for the most part—a formality.
Scenario #5: Cutting & Pasting from a CV
It is Saturday, August 12, the day Jennifer has set aside to complete the Bio-Bib. On her laptop in her small study room, she opens the Bio-Bib document she received via email from her department secretary.
Jennifer regularly keeps an electronic record of her professional activities and achievements. Most of these, like her co-publications with students are on her CV, which she keeps up-to-date. Those that are not on her CV, she stores in an electronic folder. She keeps a small stack of potentially useful paper documents in her special red folder in her office desk drawer. She has brought her red folder home to complete her report.
Jennifer wants easy transfer of data, as close to automatic as possible. For her, the publications section of the Bio-Bib must be able to accommodate the cutting and pasting of information from her CV and other on-line documents to minimize typing.
Scenario #6: Editing & Resubmitting a Journal Publication
It is 4:50 PM on Friday afternoon, and Mark Lund is rushing to finish up on his Bio-Bib report. He promised the department secretary that he would complete it by Monday morning, but he promised his wife that he would pick her up from work at 5:30 PM to take her to dinner. He figures that he has ten minutes to quickly enter the remaining publications information and submit the report, before he has to leave.
It was a prolific year for Mark, as he co-authored 3 articles in rather prestigious journals. He has just entered the third publication and is scanning the preview of all of his publications, when he realizes that he misspelled the last name of one of his co-authors. He wants to change the spelling before he submits his final report.
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Storyboards & Missing Screens
To view storyboards and missing screens click here.
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Prototype
Overview
Trade-Offs & Choices
On the welcome page, “Edit drafts” and “View submitted Bio-Bibs” were not made active in order to concentrate on the task of creating a new Bio-Bib. The “Edit drafts” link would be used, probably more often by professors, than "Create New", because this is the link they would use to continue to add information to an already created Bio-Bib. Clicking on the "Edit drafts" tab would lead the user to page where (s)he would click the appropriate date-range hyperlink. This page would lead to the instructions page. Clicking "View submitted Bio-Bibs" would lead the user to a page where (s)he would click the appropriate date-range hyperlink. This page would lead to the “Preview” tab of the appropriate Bio-Bib, where the user could see on one page, all data entered in all tabs.
Outside links were also not made active on the prototype because of time constraints. Links such as “Contact Us”, and “Sponsors” appear, according to design convention on the top right of pages), but are not active. Clicking on "Contact Us" would lead to a page with email, phone and postal address information. The "Sponsors" page would lead to information and background on the sponsors for this Bio-Bib project.
Given the amount of time invested in researching aspects of the Publications tab, and because of time constraints, we limited the scope of our current interactive prototype to the Publications tab, so the Teaching, Research, Creative Works, UC Service, Professional Service tabs are not functional at this time. However, some work is going on to fill in the Teaching tab. Within the Publications tab, we have concentrated our efforts on making the journal article section interactive so far. We have however, sketched out the general entry layout of many of the other publication types.
The following publication types will mostly likely be identical to the one we having in place for journal articles.
Article
- Journal
- Magazine
Editor
- Journal - Special Issue
Proceeding
- Conference
- Symposium
The following publication types will have one main difference in layout – no review type is sought.
Article
- Newspaper
Book
- Chapter
- Entire
Editor
- Book - Chapter
- Book - Entire
"Behind The Curtain"
In order for testers to be able to login to the system, we will provide them with a login and password. Currently no faculty information is accessible through the system.
Tools
- HTML
- CSS
- PHP
- JavaScript
- Illustrator
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Running the Interface
- Restricted Web Site: Password ‘By Invitation Only’ -- Get login and password from Rich
- Bio-Bibliography Login Page: enter “anno” or “marti” for the login and leave the passphrase field blank.
- Welcome Page: create a new Bio-Bib by selecting a date range.
- Enter a few journal article citations of various types.
- The prototype can be found here
Note:
- Only the journal article selection of the publications tab is functional
- When entering journal publications, slect “Preview” then "Add"; the initial "Add" button is not functional yet
- After adding a journal publication to the Bio-Bib, the ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete’ buttons are not functional for testing
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Heuristic Evaluation of SkillShop
- Eunice Chang's Heuristic Evaluation
- Dondrea Thompson's Heuristic Evaluation
- Rich Meyer's Heuristic Evaluation
- FAST Team's Combined Heuristic Evaluation
Work Distribution
Dondrea |
Eunice |
Rich |
|
| Assessment of Lo-Fi Prototype | 33% |
33% |
33% |
| Revised Interface Design Write Up | 0% |
1000% |
0% |
| Overview Write Up & Instructions | 100% |
0% |
0% |
| Write Up Editing/td> | 33% |
33% |
33% |
| Building Prototype | 0% |
0% |
100% |
| Web Page | 0% |
0% |
100% |