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Project

Overview

The purpose of the course project is to design a software and/or hardware system for a small user community. The user community should not be students, software professionals, or other individuals working in a computer-science related field. As well, the user community needs some defining aspect to hold them together. Groups such as tourists tend to work poorly because they are both too heterogeneous in the things they do and are not performing the tasks on a regular basis (few people are tourists every other day or every week). The goal of the project is to explore work practice, to identify common breakdowns, and to address those breakdowns by redesigning both the work people do and the way that technology supports the work people do. Examples of design communities that have worked well in the past include:
  • Wet lab scientists
  • School teachers (though the user community should teach the same or nearly the same grade level)
  • Doctors
  • Nurses
  • Librarians
  • Stage managers
  • Cinematographers
  • Field scientists
  • By-Law officers

Timeline

The project is organized in three phases. These are:
  1. Identifying a target group, analyzing their work practice, and identifying some aspect of work that is currently difficult or unmanageable.
  2. Redesigning the work practice around a new piece of information technology (which you also design) that significantly addresses the challenges associated with this aspect of their job.
  3. Evaluating your designs and implementing a semi-functional prototype so observers can experiment with your new system and understand how you have changed work practice.

To help you accomplish this task, there are a series of steps within each phase, including deliverables, that you must provide. These are as follows:

  1. Phase 1: Understanding users (15%)
    • January 15th: Target group selected and submitted for vetting. Group named. Group names should be descriptive. For example, if you were studying librarians, your group might be named "Bookworms".
    • January 20th: Arranged meeting with professor (or already met) to validate group selection if problems have arose.
    • January 22nd: Consent forms signed and submitted.
    • February 5th: Poster session 1.
    • February 12th: Write-up, phase 1.
  2. Phase 2: Designing for users (15%)
    • March 5th: Poster session 2.
    • March 12th: Write-up, phase 2.
  3. Phase 3: Evaluation and Prototypes (25%)
    • March 31st: Poster Session 3
    • April 6th: Final write-up due.

Resources

Phase 1 Write-Up Guidelines

For each phase, the write-up should summarize the findings and/or the work by each group from that phase. For phase 1, each group:
  1. Conducted interviews
  2. Summarized an interview's findings during an interpretation session, resulting in the creation of several different models of work
  3. Examined the interview data from all participants using an affinity diagram to note common breakdowns, intents poorly served, and opportunities for design.

Your report should summarize these findings. For example:

  1. Introduce us to the group for whom you are designing. Give some detail on their position, describing, in general terms, what they do. Think of this section like an introduction, i.e. it should summarize the rest of the report. You should also highlight some opportunities for re-design, without going into details of how you arrived at the high level opportunities. In essence, you should first give a grand tour of your write-up.
  2. Describe the interviews in detail. Present models, as appropriate, for the various tasks that the individual interviewee performed. If you needed to re-interview any participant because information was missing, be honest about that, and highlight initial gaps and how you closed those gaps. We do not need every model for every interviewee.
  3. While an entire depiction of you affinity diagram is probably beyond the scope of a report, you can walk the reader through aspects of your affinity. Describe common breakdowns, perhaps using consolidated sequence diagrams or consolidated artifact models that were found in your affinity diagram. Add evidence by providing quotes from your subjects, observations that you wrote down, and photos that you captured. These aspects may, of necessity, need to be focused on opporunities for re-design. It's perfectly acceptable to start the segment saying that, for example: "There are four aspects of work practice, currently containing breakdowns, that we have identified as possible candidates for re-design. These are X, Y, and Z." Start a new paragraph, and discuss how you identified X as a possible re-design target, using info from your affinity diagram and consolidated models together.
  4. Summarize the report. Write a conclusion.

I do not have length targets or ranges for the report. The report should be an appropriate length. It is hard to imagine someone doing the above in less than 5 or 6 pages of text (single-spaced, 11 pt font, etc.). When small diagrams are interspersed with text, it is perfectly acceptable for groups to hand in en or so pages. Some groups may had in more, some less. This is not even a guideline for length. However, if you are handing in more than ten or twelve pages, take a careful look to make sure all the information is truly relevant. You want the information organized and structured for the reader. The goal is not to tell us everything. Instead, tell us what you found, and use the rest of your data as evidence.

This is a significant amount of work, and I am mindful of that. I understand that this course represents a significant time investment, and I know that writing up your data can, sometimes, be a lengthy process. Phase 1 is the most lengthy write-up, followed by phase 3. Phase 2 is shorter, and will require little or no interview time, depending on how well your phase 1 has been done. The goal of this work is to front-load, as much as possible, the work in the course. My hope is that the workload (in terms of time invested in write-up and deliverables) will decrease for subsequent phases of the project.

Phase 2 Write-up Guidelines

This phase describes low-fidelity prototypes. You should write a report of at most five pages that does the following:
  • Summarizes your problem area (<0.5 pages).
  • Describes the design space for solutions that you explored (< 2 pages).
  • Describes the low-fidelity prototype you have produced (< 2 pages).
  • Describes and evaluation plan for that low-fidelity prototype, including target dates (<2 pages).
Also, include pictures of your prototype