Goals

The goals of this assignment are to flesh out the project idea that you are working on and to get to know your team members. We will use this to make sure you do not head down a very unproductive design path (both by discussing the idea with your team and by getting feedback from us). What you write here is not an unchangeable commitment, but should be a good idea of the path you might follow.

There are four main parts to this assignment:

• A revision of the original proposal
• A task analysis
• An initial sketch of the interface
• An outline of the evaluation of the interface

Meet with the members of the team and assess your strengths. Assign management roles to each team member. The manager is responsible for making sure the work gets done, not for actually doing the work themselves. Everyone needs to help out with the different parts of the project. Suggested management role breakdowns are:
• group manager (coordinate things; maintain the big picture)
• documentation manager (coordinate writeups)
• design manager (coordinate design aspects of interface)
• evaluation manager (coordinate evaluation of interface

Most groups have three members, so the group manager should also take on one of the additional roles. Your writeup should state who is taking on what roles.

Make a preliminary web page for your project in your group directory.

Write up a concise statement of the problem you are tackling and a brief synopsis of your proposed solution (1 paragraph for problem/solution). Then give a longer analysis of the problem and tell us what some of the existing solutions are and what is wrong with their approaches.

Decide on and describe the target user types of the system and the kinds of tasks you are designing for. Formulate the task analysis questions you want to ask potential users. Interview three potential users as you did for the previous assignment and report on your findings. (What questions you asked, the characteristics of the interviewees, a summary of their responses to your questions.)

Create three representative scenarios based on the results of these interviews and what you know about the application area.

Use these to help guide you in the design of the interface.

Next, tell us about your suggested solution. Give a rationale for your design ideas. This section should clearly indicate the functionality of your artifact and what the user interface will be like (described and sketched). You should then describe how the three scenarios described above can be supported in the interface design. You should include "storyboards" of the sequences described in your three scenarios.

This description should include hand-drawn sketches of user interface ideas for your project (it is preferable if you scan these in; if not, you need to hand in two hardcopies of your assignment). These sketches are to be hand-drawn and rough -- do not spend a considerable amount of time trying to make them nice, but you should label them clearly in a different color to describe the elements in the sketch (look at the CS 160 web site for ideas of what rough sketches look like: http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/courseware/cs160/fall97/projects/index.html).

Finally, give us an idea of the experiments you might run to test this interface idea out. How about testing just a very rough interface prototype that has little functionality behind it? How would you test it later when there is more functionality? For all experiments, you should clearly indicate the independent variables, dependent variables, participants, method, and discussion of the expected results

This is a group assignment, so please work as a group.

This assignment must be written up in HTML and handed in on-line. Kevin is going to arrange for group directories once the groups are solidified. Dan will help make the links appear in one place.

Your writeup should follow this outline with separate sections for the top-level items (it is preferable if you scan in the sketches; if not, you need to hand in two hardcopies of your assignment).

In total the writeup should have no more than 5 pages, excluding sketches, of which we encourage many.

1. Group names and management roles
2. Problem and solution overview (up to 1 page)
3. Task Analysis (up two 2 pages)
   • Target users and tasks
   • Interview questions and results of interviews
   • 3 scenarios of example task sequences
4. Suggested Solution (up to 2 pages)
• Functionality (i.e., what can you do with it)
• User interface (i.e., how you use it)
• Drawings of proposed interfaces (should be rough sketches) [do not count in page limit]
5. Experiment outline (up to 1/2 page)
1. Informally testing the rough prototype
2. Formal study:
   • Independent variables
   • Dependent variables
   • Participants
   • Method
   • Results and discussion