CS124/182: Investigation 3

Simple Interface Design

Due: Friday, Feb 12, 11:55pm on Sakai

This is a pair investigation. You should find a partner and complete this investigation together, submitting only one writeup between the two of you.

Goals

The goals of this Investigation are:

To get more practice with user and task analysis based on interviews, rather than observation
To apply the design principles we have discussed to design an effective user interface
To prepare for the first stage of evaluation: Paper prototyping

Before you Begin

Before you begin this assignment you should find yourself a partner. Feel free to use the class email lists (cs-124-l@hmc.edu/cs-182-l@hmc.edu) for this purpose. You should also have completed all of the reading assignments through Monday, Feb 8 (though you can do Parts 1-3 after Wednesday, Feb 3rd).

Assignment

In this investigation your goal is to construct an initial design for a user interface to support the task of your choice. This interface may be traditional (e.g., menus and buttons) or slightly non-traditional (e.g. include touch or pen input) but it must involve some visual component (e.g., there should be a screen with which the user will interact). You will integrate Norman's design principles and user and task analysis in designing your interface. The end result of this assignment will an interface that is directly translatable into a paper prototype.

Part 1: Choose your problem

Your goal is to design an interface to support some users performing some tasks, but the exact problem you choose to build your interface to support is totally up to you. Here are some guidelines to help you choose your problem area:

Your interface must have a visual, interactive component. It may involve non-traditional input, such as touch or handwriting (including recognition), but it cannot be an ephemeral interface (e.g. a light controller than magically turns on the lights by detecting your motion through the house)
Creative problem areas are encouraged, but not required. In other words, your interface does nothave to support an original problem area. It is perfectly fine to develop an interface to support digital photo organization, even though there are a million interfaces out there that do just that. However, if your problem area is not original, be careful to design your interface from first principles, rather than being influenced too much by an existing design. Of course you can take into account what current designs too, but try to focus on why they do these things. That is, what tasks do they support.

To spark your imagination, here are some ideas of possible problem areas that you could build an interface to support. Feel free to use one of the ideas listed below, or choose your own:

Energy use. Design an interface to help people track and manage their energy use in their home.
Museum visits: Design an interface that guides patrons through a museum exhibit.
Riding public transportation: Design an interface that helps people choose what public transportation they can take from point A to point B (a particularly challenging task in the LA area!)

The only tasks that you may not choose are the tasks you examined in Investigation 2: buying coffee, or teaching lecture.

Part 2: User and Task Analysis based on Interviews (or Questionnaires)

Similar to what you did in Investigation 2, identify the target populations for your interface, including the characteristics of each population.

Then identify three tasks commonly performed by your users that you will design your interface to support. You DO NOT need to perform a complete task analysis as you did in I2. You need only identify the task and comment briefly on how this task is supported by current technology (including problems with this support). In addition, for each task you should also include a "scenario-like" description that describes a concrete, realistic example of the task. E.g., your task might be "find a quick, tasty recipe involving a limited number of ingredients". A corresponding scenario task might be, "You come home at 7pm, very hungry. You look in the refrigerator and see that you have mushrooms and tomatoes. Find a recipe that is quick to make that involves mushrooms and tomatoes, but otherwise only "staple" foods from the pantry and fridge." Follow the example that we did in class.

To identify your users and tasks you should interview members of your user population. In your writeup you will be asked to justify your user and task analysis based on these interviews. Instead of interviews, you may administer a questionnaire if you prefer. Note that these interviews/questionnaires are to help you discover what tasks your users want to perform and what's wrong with the current ways they perform these tasks. They should be done before you do your design. In this investigation the point is NOT to show an existing design to your users. We'll do that in I4.

Part 3: Requirements Specification

List the major Usability/User Experience goals for your system. Do you want your system to be fast? Easy to learn? Fun to use? After you list your goals, justify this goal set based on your interviews, task analysis, and/or user analysis.

Part 4: Interface Design/Storyboards

Based on your interviews, your user and task analysis, and on Norman's design principles that we have discussed, design your interface. Your goal in this section is to produce storyboard sketches of your interface. This section describes exactly what this means, so keep reading...

Your interface design needs to be broad enough to support all three of the tasks you identified in Part 2, and could possibly include other information that is not directly represented by a task (but if you do this, you should understand why the information is there). The way you will present your design is through three separate storyboards, one for each task. For each task, you should illustrate with pictures and words how the system and the user interact to accomplish the goal.

For each task, your storyboard starts with a sketch of the main page of the interface. It then lists the steps that the user performs to accomplish the task, giving new sketches of the interface where appropriate. It should be very specific, including a drawing for every new screen, and including every action the user performs, as we discussed in class on Monday, Feb 8. Remember that your interface needs to be consistent between tasks (i.e., it can't change from one task to another).

Please note that your sketches should NOT be polished. They can and should be rough. Just put down enough so that someone can understand your design.

You will likely want to make several design sketches before you settle on a "final" design. When discussing the interface design with your partner, remember that you are not the user. You must justify your design decisions using your interviews, user analysis, task analysis, and formal design principles. It's tempting to argue about interface decisions based on your own personal preference. If you ever catch yourself (or your partner) saying "I would like this interface better if..." or "I wouldn't ever use this button...", stop and rethink your position. Don't waste time arguing about what you would prefer. You'll probably find that people react differently than you expected anyway.

What to Turn in

This investigation should be submitted electronically through your Sakai dropbox. Be sure to follow the submission guidelines on the main Investigations page.

Problem description: Write one or two paragraphs describing the problem that you are designing your interface to support. In this section you should not describe your interface at all.
User and Task analysis: Include your writeup of your user and task analysis as described in Part 2. Include justification for the specific tasks and user characteristics you include by referring to your interviews of users/questionnaires.
Requirements Specification: Also in your writeup, you should include your requirements specification and justification from Part 3 above.
Interface Design Sketches: Submit your storyboards (1 for each task). These should include several sketches each. Please submit these sketches electronically (e.g. by scanning them in or drawing them directly on an electronic tablet.)
Design Justification: Justify the major components of your design by referring either to your user/task analysis (and the interviews, where appropriate) or to the design principles we discussed in class. Include a discussion of decisions that ended up being somewhat arbitrary (e.g. you and your partner talked about it and couldn't find a compelling reason for one design over another). Sometimes these "guesses" are necessary, so it's not bad if you have some of these.

Grading

Investigation 3 grading rubric

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