General Information about Assignment
Submission: You will submit your work electronically using the EEE Dropbox (a link will be provided for every assignment). You need your UCINet ID and password to use the Dropbox system. Assignments should be turned in before the deadline. Late submission will not be graded.
Design Notebook: The idea of design notebook is from Prof. David Kay. We expect every student this quarter to carry at (nearly) all times a small notebook. Whenever you come across or observe a particularly good or bad example of interaction design or your own design ideas, jot down the details in your notebook. Often these instances are fleeting and subtle; You may think you will remember it later on, but you typically won't, so it's best to carry the notebook and record the details when they occur. We will not ask you to turn in your notebook, but you may draw heavily from the material in your notebook for your assignment and in-class activities. We certainly hope you will make it a regular habit to use your design notebook beyond this course.
Assignment 1
Part (I)
Pick one instance of a bad interaction design from your HCI notebook. This can be a computer-based system or any human-created object. Do not pick examples discussed in our class.
(a) Describe the relevant details of the system.
(b) Explain one problem you encountered, relating it to failure(s) of usability goals or principles.
(c) Describe your suggestions for improvement.
Do not write more than 1/2 page of text (not including illustrations if you have).
Part (II)
Pick a web site somewhere at uci.edu that you use frequently. Analyze it as described above. As an upper limit, don't spend more than an hour exploring the site and making notes, and do not write more than 1 page of text (again not including illustrations if you have).
Your analysis should address who the intended users of the site are, what the users want to achieve by using the site, how the site failed to serve these users and their goals (including, if applicable, characteristics of the users and their backgrounds that the site designers didn't understand or accommodate well), and what makes your suggested improvements better.
Note: this assignment was from Prof. David Kay's Inf131 class.
Combine all your answers into one electronic document and upload it in this dropbox by Aug. 7th 5pm.
Assignment 2
(a) We have discussed these topics in class, among others:
• Miller's 7 +/– 2 items (capacity of short-term memory)
• Gestalt laws
• Fitts' Law
• Graphical coding
• Anthropomorphism
• Affordances
Pick two of these six topics; for each of the two, choose an example from your design notebook that illustrates the topic
(or find an example from your own experience if your notebook doesn't have one).
Don't choose examples we discussed in class or that come directly from the readings.
Your examples may show a misapplication or misunderstanding of the principles or may be a particularly good example;
in either case, describe and analyze each example using the terms and guidelines that pertain to the topic it illustrates.
If your example is a negative one, suggest an improvement and describe why your suggestion is better.
A dozen pithy lines of text should be sufficient for each of the two examples
(where "pithy" means clean, clear, well-organized, terse, and not padded); half a page for each is an absolute maximum.
(Again, this refers just to the text; you will probably use more than half a page each if you count illustrations.)
(b) How many different items have you recorded in your design notebook so far?
We'll give full credit for any truthful answer to this, even zero, but we'd like to know how much use the class is making of these notebooks.
(c) (optional) Do this on-line study illustrating Fitts' Law. It doesn't include much explanation,
but the task should give you a tangible understanding of the principle behind Fitts' Law. There's nothing to turn in for this part.
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Note: the above assignments were from Prof. David Kay's Inf131 class.
(d) This part is preparation for a later assignment. You can do it before, during, or after Thursday's class meeting.
Form a group of 4 students who are all enrolled in the class. Together, find a computer-based application or service that you want to work on as your project for the class.
Ideally, the project idea should be useful to “real-world” users, e.g., a mobile application for kids to learn languages.
In later assignments, we will ask you to evaluate existing systems that provide same or similar functionalities, elicit user requirements, design UI alternatives and prototype one of them,
and evaluate your prototype. For now, though, just form your team, decide on an application domain, and locate, install and try out applications/services that do similar things if they exist.
The things you need to turn in for this part are the names of your team members and optionally the name of your team (if you pick one). If you cannot find a team, we will pick one for you.
Combine all your answers into one electronic document and upload it in this dropbox by Aug. 14th 5pm.
Assignment 3
This is a group assignment. Each group should have one team member submit the report that has every member’s name.
(a) Briefly describe the application or system you plan to design.
(b) Understand the problem and establish requirements (make sure your report addresses the following bullets):
- Briefly describe how and what data you gathered.
- Who are your primary and secondary users? What are their important characteristics?
- What are the two most important user tasks that your system supports? How do users achieve these tasks currently?
- Evaluate an existing system in terms of its pros and cons from a usability/user experience perspective.
- What are the contexts in which the system will be used? Consider the physical, technical, social and organizational requirements.
- What are the constraints and assumptions of the system?
- Create a primary persona and a secondary persona (follow the format we discussed in class).
- Conduct task analyses on the top two user tasks you identified.
- What are the design implications you derived from your data?
- Discuss any lessons that you learnt from your data gathering and data analysis activities and what you would have done differently.
(c) Based on your understanding of the problem, users and contexts from part (b), describe in detail 3 design alternatives that your team devised (using sketches, screenshots, text descriptions, etc). Articulate important design decisions that your team made, and justify them preferably by referring back to what you learnt from part (b).
(d) Prototype one of the three design alternatives. The prototype does not have to be fully functional, but it should demonstrate clearly how a user would interact with the system to achieve his or her task. You can use any prototyping tools that you like such as paper, clay, PowerPoint, HTML, Photoshop, Visio, or Visual Basic. Keep in mind that your prototype needs to be evaluated later on with real users. If you cannot submit the prototype electronically, submit it directly to the instructor before the deadline.
(e) Describe what each team member contributed to this assignment.
Combine all your answers into one electronic document and upload it in this dropbox by Aug. 28th 5pm.
Assignment 4
This is a group assignment. Each group should have one team member submit the report that has every member’s name.
(a) Briefly describe the application or system you designed (one paragraph, just to remind me).
(b) Evaluation (make sure your report addresses the following bullets):
- What were your goals for the evaluation? What were the specific things/questions you wanted to find out? E.g., workflow, screen layout, color scheme, etc.
- Briefly describe which evaluation methods you used and in what order and why?
- Present the results of your evaluation (consider graphs, stats and texts).
- What did you learn from the evaluation results? What design implications did you draw from the results?
- Which part of your system met your expectations/“worked” and which part (somewhat or completely) “failed”? How would you modify your design from what you learnt from the evaluation?
- Reflect upon your evaluation activities and subsequent analysis. Did you get the answers for the questions you aimed for the evaluation and what you would have done differently.
- Describe what each team member contributed to part (b).
(c) Team presentation (9/3 in class)
- Each team will have a total of 20 minutes to present their project (15 minutes talk and 5 minutes Q&A)
- Your talk should walk us through your design process: requirements gathering, design, prototype and evaluation.
- Preferably every team member gets to talk some part of the presentation.
- Email me your slides before the class.
Combine all your answers (part a and b) into one electronic document and upload it in this dropbox by Sep. 4th 5pm.