A4+-+Final+Project

== toc

= = =Description = The final deliverable of the course is a group project (3-4 people) involving analysis and redesign of a technological artifact of your choice. There are many possible avenues of investigation – during lab, we will work with project groups to help formulate a viable project. The only requirement is that the artifact in question must involve an analysis of user experience, which means you must have access to the technology in question and its user community. There are many interim deadlines to structure progress in this assignment.

= = =Break Down =

__Part A__

 * Proposal and Group Formation (March 2nd – no mark, but reviewed for feedback)**

Teams of 3-4 will create their own project wiki and in doing so, highlight the area of investigation and specify the artifact/ environment/ service for re-design. It will include the following components:

a) A group resume (an outline of team members, their individual skills, and collective rules and responsibilities.) A handy guide to group dynamics in collaborative projects [|can be found here]. b) A PACT analysis that outlines the initial direction of the team's design project (an initial brainstorming leading to a refinement of project goals) c) Also include exploration of findings of sources, examples, benchmarks and inspirations (documentation of initial research)

__Part B__

 * User Study (Mar. 9 for parts a-d - full documentation due March 30 – 10%)**

For this phase each group will design a research plan to gather insights into the behaviors and needs of the people who will be involved with the product or system. Evaluation and analysis of this data will inform design requirements. It will include the following components.

a) Statement of user study goals. What are the major questions you want answered regarding how users use the technology in question? About what they may want to see as an alternative? b) Provide notes on research methods considered to answer the questions noted above. Why these methods? Why not others? c) Are there any ethical issues that you may encounter? How will you address these? d) Provide a copy of actual questions asked and procedures applied. e) A executive summary of your findings f) Analysis and interpretation of the collected data to identify patterns or themes.

__Part C__

 * Scenarios and Requirements (Mar. 16 – 5%)**

Each team will generate a series of scenarios that reflect user interaction, as informed by the user study (min 1 scenario per group member).

The collection of scenarios should reflect the full complexity of the technology and usage context in question (e.g., it should hit on all the important people, activities, context and technologies you've noted...)

While scenarios may be forward looking (e.g., describing features or functions that don't yet exist, but should) the scenarios should be partially based in actual use patterns (e.g., actual problems that do exist at present...) In other words, the scenarios must reflect at least in part what the current situation is and not be complete conjectures on what could be.

Each scenario will be broken down to requirements, prioritized from "must" to "would be nice" using the MoSCoW approach from text and lecture notes.

__Part D__

 * Revised Design - Presentation and Documentation** **(****March 30 ** **– 15%)**

On this day, you'll have 5-7 minutes to present your final redesign ideas. All user study and scenarios should be done - you can have the documentation of all that available on the wiki. The presentation should touch on the main goals of your work and the results. It's done in informal critique and discussion with either Prof. Jones or Littlejohn around the lab tables - don't prepapre to speak to the entire class, as there's no time for such presentations. If you have a video or something that requires more than 5 minutes to show, be prepared to cue it up to the core message - we can look at the full video after the presentations. We'll look at the entirety of the project after presentations are completed.

Final Project Groups

( Guide for using Elara )