Project Requirements

There are three phases to the project. Phase 1 involves understanding users, and has one primary deliverable. Phase 2 involves UI design to low-fidelity prototypes, and has two deliverables. Phase 3 involves evaluation and prototyping, and has one deliverable.

Phase 1: Understanding Users

The primary goal of phase 1 is to understand your users and to identify opportunities for design. With this in mind, you:

Interview participants
Create models of individual work practices
Construct an affinity diagram
Identify opportunities for re-design of work around technology.
Consolidate models to ensure that your work is sufficiently generalizable across your participants

The primary deliverable at the end of phase 1 is a 2-page document that identifies the breakdown you will address, why that is an important breakdown, and also lists other breakdowns you identified with short rationalizations for why you won't design around these breakdowns. A couple of points on the breakdown you will address:

Information from both the models of work, from consolidation of the models of work, and from you affinity diagram should be used to justify your breakdown. I expect to see images of work models and images of your affinity diagrams. Annotate the images with labels describing big themes that you identified in the affinity, and then use those big themes (potentially with quotes from your participants) to link back and highlight why the breakdown is significant. The goal of this supporting material is to convince me that you have the best breakdown. Think of it like persuasive writing.
There are other breakdowns, and it is useful to have those other breakdowns listed at the end of this document. You can include a 2 or 3 line justification for why you aren't tackling this breakdown, and it is even reasonable to say that "we decided on the other breakdown, even though this one is also a good possibility".

Alongside the 2-page write-up, I expect images (digital camera is fine) of all of the models you created, of the consolidated models that you created, and of the affinity diagram. These should be annotated in some way (e.g. use a sharpie for labels so I can make things out, etc.). These can simply be attached to the end of your 2-page document.

Phase 2: Design

The primary goal of phase 2 is to redesign work, and to design technology around a new way of working. With this in mind, you:

Create a vision for a new system.
Use HTA or scenarios or some combination of the two to re-cast work around technology.
Design a UED of your new system, as specified in the context of work.
Draw a set of low-fidelity prototypes which communicates to users the design of the new system.

For phase 2, your poster session is on July 2nd. For this poster session, I expect to see two things. At the poster session, modify your original poster to start with the breakdown you are addressing, and include a vision of your new system. Include representations of new work practice and your UED. Together, these let viewers comment on how your are changing work. As well, include a set of low-fidelity prototypes for your system.

Phase 2's write-up is due on July 12th, so significantly after the poster session. Your goal in the week after the poster session is to meet with at least one of your clients (you can also do this during the poster session), collect feedback, and then to iterate on your prototype. The goal of this iteration is to identify problems with your prototypes and to make sure that you have broadly explored alternatives in design. Remind your participants that you really need to know what you did wrong. If you can change, adapt, and improve your prototype, you receive significantly more credit for this session then if everything seems fine but significant problems are uncovered later.

For Phase 2's write-up, you are to produce a 3-page document detailing your testing and the results of your testing. Also include your initial prototype from the poster session, and the new prototype that you created. The low-fidelity prototype can be an annotated set of photos that essentially reads like a basic user manual. Feel free to use any convenient tool to create this snapshot: OneNote can be useful, as can Word with pictures dropped in.

Phase 3: Semi-Functional Prototyping

For phase 3, the goal is to give an impression of how your final system can be used. As a result, we expect two things. The first, for the poster session, is a basic prototype with limited back-end support. I don't particularly care if all of the data is hard-coded, and flexibility is non-existent. What I want is a throw-away prototype that gives me the sense of using your system. GUI builders, Flash, HTML 5: These are your friends for this phase of the project. You don't particularly need to change your poster, though I do expect a modified low-fidelity prototype for this poster session, alongside the final implementation -- as hacky as the final implementation might be.

If you need interactions to support these systems, remember that you have options available in the world. The AR toolkit, Open CV, and other freely available software packages have proven useful in building basic interactive functionality for gestures, movements, and other tracking systems. Android has great development tools for mobile systems. And GUI builders on Windows and Mac can produce platform-centric interfaces with limited back-end detail. Finally, even powerpoint and HTML5/Javascript have been used to create prototypes that give you the sense of interaction.

The final submission for the course is due at the end of the semester (with a 4-day grace period -- so get it to me by sometime around the first weekend in August -- preferably before Sunday at midnight). It should include a document describing:

Your user community.
The breakdown you addressed.
Your vision for the new system.
Your new work practice.
The UED of the new system.
Your initial prototype.
End-user feedback.
Your final low-fidelity prototype.
Screenshots of your final implementation.
Include a final section that points to your video (see below) and indicates whether or not I can archive it and make it available to future students. These may include students taking the course, or it may include prospective undergraduate students for Waterloo.

Note that everything except the final screenshots are a re-gisting of the information you submitted earlier.

Also include a simple video of your software. You can made use of screen capture systems, or you can use a cell-phone camera (including a camera on the cell phones in the DC library) to show how your final system works. The goal here is to communicate a working system overview of what your system does. Don't kill yourself producing this video, but don't do it all in one take. Use iMovie, Camtasia, or some other video editor to splice things together, and then record the voice track in a way that doesn't sound totally janky. Put the video somewhere where I can access and download it (e.g. YouTube). Also, indicate to me whether or not it is ok if I archive the video on my YouTube channel (with link-only sharing, not publicly) so that I can use them as resources in another term for this course.