Format of Report
In the project description, I indicated
that the expected outcomes are:
- A record of the design process leading to a potentially usable
design.
- A prototype and an empirical usability evaluation of this prototype.
- An understanding of how to apply the methodologies we have been
studying, and of which methodologies fit your working style and
chosen design problem.
Your report should convey these outcomes in a clear and efficient
manner. It can make use of the previous assignments but should not merely paste them together. You will need to
- Make corrections to your previous work as needed to address our feedback. (You don't want to present incorrect use of the design tools in your final project.)
- Provide a brief narrative that ties the steps together. (Too many of the assignment work just threw some representations at me without explaining what was going on.)
I suggest the following format for most projects. (Not applicable to this semester: Projects
that started with existing systems should modify this format to
include evaluation of the existing system before the "Requirements".)
1. Introduction
Introduce the project by rewriting Assignment
7 as you see appropriate. (You need not address the report
to your "boss".) This should be a maximum of one
page. (The project will be presented on the web. I am using
the printed page only as a rough guide to length.)
(Insert evaluation of existing system here if you are improving
an existing system.)
2. Requirements
Draw upon your work for assignments 8
thorugh 9, but improve your presentation
of this work as suggested by your experience as well as the feedback
you received (from other students as well as myself) where you
think improvement is needed.
Try to make it readable by providing explanatory narrative: don't
just concatenate your requirements representations. The length of
this part of your report will depend on your project.
3. Conceptual and Physical Design
Show how the design proceeded in two steps: conceptual and physical design.
a. Show how the conceptual design addressed the requirements.
b. Show how the representations and interactions at the physical design level implement the semantic and task specifications of the conceptual design level.
In other words, make each step accountable to the previous step. You can do this by drawing upon your work for assignments 10 and 11, improving your presentation
and providing explanatory narrative as explained above. The length
of this part of your report will depend on your project.
4. Prototyping, Evaluation and Redesign
a. Describe your evaluation plan and your prototype in the context of that plan. In other words, what were you trying to find out by constructing a prototype? How did your choice of what to prototype and how to prototype it follow from this evaluation objective?
b. Include the results of your usability testing (which was not reported
in a prior assignment), The results
should include an outline of the evaluation procedure, a summary
of the data obtained, a description of how you analyzed that data,
and the results of this analysis.
c. Discuss the changes to your design that you would make as a result of this testing.
This part will probably require several pages to report.
5. Conclusion: Discussion of Methods
Now try to draw some conclusions. What do you think about the design
methods and modeling notations you tried? How did they help to improve
your product, or how did they fail to do so? If the methods were
not helpful, what alternative method(s) would you consider trying
next time?
This part need not be longer than a page or two.
Submitting the Report
The report should be a single electronic document that can be printed for reading. You may provide hyperlinks to supporting material such as the raw data and the actual prototype, but the report document should "stand alone," being readable without following these links. (I don't want to have to browse to figure out what should be printed as part of your report.)
Place this report on your web site and upload your report as a
group reply to this assignment (the usual method). Group members
may wish to keep their own copy of the report for future reference
and job search portfolios.
Peer Assessments
If you are in a group you will need to fill out a group
participation form. They will be due by May 15th (so you have a little time to reflect on your
group's work after turning in your report).
Project Reports Due May 13th
Post them by midnight. 20% deduction for each day late.
Peer Assessments, where applicable, due May 15th
Back to Top
|