Week 11

Week 11 To-Do’s

Lecture and reading

Attend the lecture to learn about this week’s topics and obtain extra information from this week’s reading list (short articles/videos to read/watch). More details are available on the Schedule page.

Conduct a high-fidelity prototype evaluation

Plan your high-fidelity prototype evaluation by including the following components in your design document:

Write down 3 high-level, scenario-based tasks. Explain why you chose to evaluate these tasks. All three tasks will be used in each of the two evaluation methods.
Plan for heuristic evaluation. Select at least 5 heuristics from Nielson Heuristic evaluation worksheet that you want the evaluator to focus on. Write down the instructions that you will provide the evaluator including a link to your high-fidelity prototype, a list of tasks to do (without providing any explicit instructions on how to do them), and a worksheet (on which you will mark the heuristics you want the evaluator to focus on).
Plan for cognitive walkthrough. Write down the action sequence for each of the high-level tasks in a flow chart. For each action in the sequence, you will have the evaluator to ask four key questions. Write down the instructions you will give to the evaluators, which may include a brief introduction of your product, some background of your problem, how to perform the cognitive walkthrough, etc.
Conduct the evaluation. Recruit 2 evaluators for heuristic evaluations and 1 evaluator for cognitive walkthrough. Note that the evaluation can be done asynchronously while an in-person setting is preferred. For heuristic evaluation, the evaluators should be students in CS449/649 who are not in your team. For cognitive walkthrough, the evaluator should be a person outside the class. Try you best to find target users (e.g., people who fit the personas) to perform the evaluation. You must obtain consent from people participating in your evaluation if they are not a student in our CS449/649 class. Record and report your results from the evaluation.

Prepare for final project presentation

The presentation should be less than 8 minutes and recommended having 4 topics as shown below. Make sure the distinction among the four topics are clear enough in the presentation. More details are available on the Information page under Deliverable 3a. The presentation should be structured as follows:

Topic 1: Introduce Your Problem (suggested duration: 1 min). What problem is your app trying to solve?
Topic 2: Show a Quick Demo (suggested duration: 2 minutes). Show a video or a live demo of your high-fidelity prototype in action. During the demo, explain the different features and functionality of your app, and the purpose they serve. You can record a video, as you see fit; you can also show a live demo of the prototype using Figma.
Topic 3: Name 3 Surprises or Learned Lessons (suggested duration: 3 minutes). What are 3 most surprising things you learned during the design process? These can be your assumptions about the users, the problem, or the design that ended up being false.
Topic 4: Your Hope for the Future (suggested duration: 1 minute). In the ideal world, what do you hope the impact of your app would be? What kind of future does your app help build?

The same as your design document, remember to include a final slide (non-presenting) with the contributions and task divisions among team members.

Team meeting and design document

Conduct this week’s team meeting or discussion in and/or out of class. Update your design document with the meeting minutes and the outcomes of this week’s activities. More details are available on the Information page under Deliverable 2a.

Think about your final report and research proposal (CS649)

Like the mid-term report, you should start to work on your final report/research proposal earlier, as the workload in the end of term will increase. For example, you could start to polish the results in your design document, write an outline of the report, reflect on the past design stages and received feedback, and prepare figures or illustrations. Medium will be used for hosting the blog posts of your final report. More details are available on the Information page under Deliverable 3c.

For the research proposal (CS649), you should start to think about the topics and research questions that you want to investigate. The research proposal should focus on a different topic from your team project but under the same overarching theme of the class. More details are available on the Information page under Research Proposal.