Assignment 1 (due 1/29/02)
Assignment 2 (due 2/26/02)
Assignment 3 (due
3/12/02)
Assignment
4 (due 3/21/02)
Final Project (due 5/13/02, with earlier milestones)
The purpose of this assignment is
to get you thinking in terms of usability, and noticing as
a user usability issues.
During the next week, pick two times that you use some sort
of technology or information system: a web site, an ATM machine,
a car...the possibilities are many. Choose one that you have
used many times in the past, and one that you are using for
the first time. For the length a transaction, or about 15
minutes, whichever is less, notice and record usability issues
or problems. That is, for the length of this exercise, pay
attention to such issues as the following:
- instances in which you had to
modify your own activity to suit the needs of the system
or technology;
- moments of confusion or uncertainty,
such as questions about what actions you should take or
what a display or system response means;
- inconveniences, instances requiring
added effort from you -- physical (e.g., doing something,
or doing something in an awkward or effortful way) or
mental (e.g., having to remember something that takes
some effort).
- annoyance, thoughts such as,
"why do I have to do this? why can't I do that?"
- added effort or attention of
any kind.
- when you are using the system
or item with which you have experience, these may be harder
to notice. Pay attention to the ways in which you have
been trained by it to do things its way, the accommodations
that you are now used to making.
During the exercise, simply keep track
of these instances as they arise. Then summarize your observations
in a paper for me, spending a page or two on each of the two
instances. Then write a page or so reflecting on what you
learned about usability from this exercise. The point is not
to apply any of the readings, but to notice your own experience
as a user.
Stay with noticing the disjunctions between how you act and
how the system works; do not leap into redesigning it to work
better. This is hard to do; often our tendency is to focus
on how to make it better without first noticing the problems.
But premature re-design can lead to suboptimization: we solve
some problems while creating new ones.
Due January 29, 2002
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Pair up with another student in this class, and take turns interviewing one another. Aim for interviews of about ½ hour in length. If you can tape-record one another, do so.
Do NOT use the same topic for both interviews. For each, pick a topic that is of mutual interest and about which you can ask a number of questions. ('Why are you at SIMS?', for example.) Before the interview, develop an interview schedule, i.e. a set of questions and their ordering. During the interview, you may need to re-order.
Turn in your papers as a pair, so that I have both sets of questions. Turn in:
- Your interview schedule
- If applicable, a revised interview schedule: how you would do it differently were you to interview someone else. (This includes turning in a revision to show how you actually asked the questions, as opposed to how you planned to: changes in wording or question order.)
- A report on the interview for which you were the interviewer. Not a transcription, but a summary of key findings.
- (2 parts) Two reflections: one on being the interviewee, one as the interviewer.
- As interviewee, a page or so of feedback to the interviewer: what advice would you give him/her on questions, but especially on behavior, attitude, and the like during the interview? (Give them a copy of this, as well as one for me.)
In #4, reflect on such questions as:
- OVERALL: in retrospect, what worked, what would you do differently, and why?
- CONTEXT: when and where and under what conditions did you do the interviews, and what difference did it make?
- THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU: you had a prior relationship as fellow students, and you also developed a relationship during the interview. How did the relationship develop? How did your prior relationship - and the fact that you have an on-going relationship as fellow students - affect the interview?
- QUESTION CONTENTS OR TOPICS: what topics proved fruitful or difficult; which ones were helpful, which were not; which topics you found easy to address, or difficult, or too personal, or otherwise problematic.
- QUESTION WORDING: which questions you found difficult to word or understand. E.g., as interviewer, questions that were hard to word well; that the interviewee misunderstood; as interviewee, questions you found hard to understand, or to answer.
- QUESTION ORDERING: what difference the question ordering made; what re-ordering you had to do (or would have wished for) on the fly, and why.
- This is where the revised interview schedule comes in: how would you re-word and/or re-order the questions?
- TIME: did you have too much time, or too little? What different might it have made to have had more or less time?
- OVERALL: what did you learn?
Due February 26, 2002. Please be concise while thorough; no part of this needs to be very long.
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- If you are doing your final project as part of a group,
work with that group. If you are not working in
a group, you have the option to do this individually or
in a group. (Doing it in a group is good experience.)
- Draft a set of about ten heuristics relevant to
the topic of your project. You may begin with
Nielsen's, or with any other set that seems applicable
to you, but you need to customize them to your particular
project. (Cite your sources.)
- If you part of a project group, develop this list
together. Otherwise, develop your own list.
- Using these heuristics, evaluate the site.
- If you are working with your project group:
- First work separately. Each person will write a
short report (for me) summarizing your findings.
- Then come together and consolidate your work.
- Write a 2-page report summarizing your shared findings,
INCLUDING any needed revisions to the heuristics.
- Findings must be tied to the heuristics violated;
they can't simply be 'good ideas' or 'obvious.'
- If you are working in a group that is NOT your project
group:
- Pick one member's project and set of heuristics
for all of you to apply.
- Then follow the instructions above: first apply
the heuristics separately, then come together and
consolidate your findings.
- If you are working individually, you will do the
same but without the group consolidation step.
Due March 12.
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Draft a short survey. It can be related to your final project, regardless of whether you actually plan to make this a part of your project. Another possibility would be a user survey of a site you know and use, such as:
- The SIMS web site
- The UC Berkeley main page
- A site that you use often (one that you use is better than one that you have created)
Draft your survey. Include a mix of different kinds of questions, e.g., open-ended, closed-ended, and matrices.
Before you turn it in, pre-test it on at least 3 people. You want them to be as much like your target users as possible, although time and other constraints may mean that you only use your fellow students. Revise it based on your pre-tests.
Turn in:
- A short rationale: what is your purpose, what information
do you want to get, and WHY? How will you use this information
once you get it?
- Describe who your sample would be, if you could do
this "for real," and what your sampling method would be.
Define the following, as applicable, for your survey:
- Samping element: the unit about which info is collected;
- Universe: hypothetical aggregation of all elements;
- Survey population: a specified aggregation of survey
elements;
- Sampling unit: elements considered for selection;
- Sampling frame: list of sampling units;
- Observation unit: unit about which data is collected;
- Turn in the first draft that you pre-tested.
- Submit a brief report on your pre-test. On whom did
you test it and how? How does this differ from how you
would pre-test it if this weren't a class assignment?
E.g., on whom would you test it? What did you learn?
What did you need to revise, and why?
- Turn in a revised survey.
- Develop a brief plan for how the survey would be administered. If relevant, explicitly consider the lack of cooperation that is common among Web user surveys.
Due March 21.
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Your project is to perform a preliminary needs and usability
assessment on a software product, information system, or web
site. You may choose an existing system or service, or one
under development. The more real it is, the better the project.
If you can work with a client organization or group, that's
great. But you can also pick a site or product with which
you have no direct connection.
You will write a plan and document the results of your assessments
in a report to be used by the design and management teams.
Your report should include, at a minimum:
A statement of the purpose of the system or site to be evaluated.
A plan including objectives and schedule for assessments.
A description of the target users.
A list of tasks being addressed in your assessments.
A plan and partial results for assessments in at least three
of the following categories:
Inspection / heuristic evaluation
Surveys
Interviews
Formal usability tests
Guidelines evaluation
For each assessment method you use, document the following:
- Your rationale for choosing the method, why it is appropriate for this site and this audience.
- Any assessment materials, e.g. scenarios and user questionnaire from usability test.
- Results from performing the assessment. These can be partial, e.g., one or two users when you intend to test or survey many more.
- Recommendations for design changes based on the assessment results.
Your report should detail and justify further assessments
that you plan to undertake. Include in your justification
the likely benefits of the assessment for the organization,
the service or site assessed, and the target users. Also include
in your report a discussion of possible larger impacts and
issues that might result in revised goals for the site, or
a revised implementation. The idea is to consider issues at
many different levels, not to be stuck in only looking at,
say, the interface.
Don't consider yourself limited to what's described above.
Part of your responsibility is to determine what will be most
useful in matching this site to its users' needs.
Assume that your management is skeptical about the benefits
of what they fear could be a time-consuming and costly project.
You must both answer their concerns and ensure that the project
is as lean and fast-paced as possible to get good results.
Due Dates
Class assignments may be applied to your project; or not.
E.g., you will have an assignment to do heuristic evaluation.
You may or may not choose to do heuristic evaluation as part
of your project. In addition, dates specific to your project:
| Feb 12 |
Project choice and preliminary
plan with objectives and dates (draft) |
| Feb 19 |
Target users definitions / matrix
(draft) |
| Feb 28 |
Task list for project, methods
for gathering/prioritizing tasks (draft) |
| March 19 |
Progress report |
| April 16 |
Progress report |
| May 7 & 9 |
Project presentations |
| May 13, 5 p.m. |
Final project report due |
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