Objectives
- To report results of your evaluation, but more importantly, ...
- To learn evaluation methods, and
- To experience what can be learned from user testing: to experience
that your intuitions are not always sufficient, and that there
is no substitute for testing a design before you commit to it
by going too far in project development.
What to do
Carry out the evaluation that you planned in Assignment 9!
Then report on what happened. See below for details on the online and classroom versions of this report.
What to turn in
Online Assignment
Add a report of your evaluation to your project web site, as described below.
- The report should be in a form that you think would be usable by a client. In other words, pretend that you have been asked to evaluate a design someone else made, and write a report for them.
- The report will address answers to your evaluation questions, and can also report on anything unexpected that came up.
- The format is up to you, but should be logical and make sense for the product being evaluated. If there is one basic functionality but different kinds of issues, the report could be organized by issues. If it has multiple functionalities, the report could be organized by these functionalities, with each section organized by issues.
- Summarize the data and link to details if necessary: don't overload the reader with the raw data.
- Conclude with a few comments on how you would improve the design.
Submit the URL of this evaluation page as your assignment. The official due date is 5/2. I'll accept them later, but you'll get my feedback later and you need it for the final project report due the week after. Class Presentation
Prepare a presentation to be given in class 5/2. The content of this is based on but a little different from your online report. In this presentation you are talking to fellow designers, not a client.
Media: If you have a laptop, you can present from your laptop. Otherwise assume it will be a Mac OS X machine. You may put your presentation on the web, or bring it on a flash drive, CD-ROM or your laptop's harddrive. I suggest doing more than one of these.
Time: Single person projects should plan on 8 minutes of presentation. Two person projects can take 10 minutes and three person projects can take 12 minutes to allow for presentation of the extra work that groups did.
Content: Here is a suggested outline:
- Take about 30 seconds to remind us of your project's objectives.
- For each design method used (SBD, UCD, Contextual Design, Pictive), give up to 2 minutes of an overview of the process you went through. Be selective, presenting what you think may be interesting to us.
- What questions arose during the design process, such as alternative designs or new ideas that you are not sure users will understand?
- If you used multiple methods, which do you think was most useful? Did they converge on the same design or did they suggest different designs? How did you resolve this?
- Give an overview of the evaluation you conducted.
- What questions (e.g., from 2) were you trying to address in the evaluation?
- Show us the prototype and your plan for using the prototype to answer these questions.
- Tell us what you found out. We don't need to see all the data (relevant excerpts can be posted online). Instead, tell us what you learned, including both answers to your evaluation questions and anything unexpected that came up.
- Conclude with a few comments on how you would improve the design.
This will give us a good starting point for a brief discussion. Due 5/2
We will discuss your results in class 5/2, and give you advice
for finishing the evaluation and your final reports.
Pau |