Even for a well-understood, well-motivated problem, choosing a design to invest time into is a difficult and laborious process. This group assignment, spanning multiple weeks of the course, tackles the problem of selecting the right design through contextual inquiry, task development, generating multiple potential designs, and finally selecting a design to pursue.
This is a group assignment, consisting of several milestones. It is worth 20% of your overall course grade:
In this assignment, you will brainstorm a large set of possible tasks and design ideas for your project. You will then use contextual inquiry to learn more about your problem and the current practices of people who might use your design. You will draw upon the ideas developed in your brainstorming and the observations made in your contextual inquiry to help develop a set of potential tasks your design might support. You will next sketch how a set of initial designs might support those tasks. You will choose a design to pursue in the remainder of the course and storyboard the details of your design in the context of important tasks Finally, you will present your design process in a report and presentation.
More specifically, you will do the following:
Generate ideas for potential problems, tasks, features, and interactions using a group ideation exercise.
Use the contextual inquiry method in observing and interviewing at least three people who might use your design.
Develop six tasks that might be performed with your design.
Select these to capture the important aspects of the problem you are solving and to provide coverage of the designs you will explore. Create these based on your observations and analyses of existing tasks as well as your vision for new tasks enabled by potential designs. Remember that tasks say what is accomplished, while leaving open how to accomplish it.
As you progress through your project, you can and should consider revising your tasks. Expect to refine or change your tasks as your understanding of the problem matures or according to feedback you receive. The tasks you report in this assignment therefore must be appropriate but are not necessarily final.
Brainstorm and sketch three very different initial designs for your interface. Each design should support four of your tasks.
Do not illustrate the entire design, but instead sketch key aspects needed to illustrate the functionality. These should be rough sketches on paper (i.e., not digital mockups), including illustrations of their relations (e.g., arrows showing transitions and relationships).
The purpose of these sketches is to explore the design space before you lock yourself into a single design. They must demonstrate significant consideration of substantially different approaches to your problem.
From your sketches, select one design to pursue for the remainder of the quarter and two tasks that emphasize critical functionality of your design. These tasks should be non-trivial, critical to solving your problem, and should emphasize long-lived or repeated activities. In contrast, a one-time login screen for a social networking application is not worth being the focus of your project, does not define your project functionality, and is not interesting.
Storyboard your chosen design for your chosen tasks, illustrating how the tasks are accomplished in your design.
Summarize your design process in a report and presentation.
Generate 64 different ideas related to your project, including:
We will provide large sheets of paper and post-its. Write or sketch each idea on a separate post-it and stick it on your sheet of paper. Each idea should be a quick doodle with a caption or a short sentence or phrase. A person familiar with your project but not in your group should be able to understand the idea each sketch conveys. Use color, space, and arrows (on your sheet of paper) to organize your ideas as you go.
The goal is to begin exploring the space of possibilities, not attempting to polish some particular possibility. Focus on the quantity of ideas, not the quality of any one idea. You may include ideas from existing products. No two ideas should be alike. When you get stuck, find a context to inspire new ideas.
In class, one of the course staff will sign off on what you completed.
You will be able to take your paper with you, and you should continue brainstorming throughout your project.
This milestone is worth 0.5% of your total grade and will be graded based on a good-faith attempt to generate ideas during the ideation brainstorming exercise.
In one paragraph, describe the people who might use your design and other stakeholders for your design. Describe the particular contextual inquiry participants you plan to pursue, including some details of their background and the environment where you will observe their current practices. Give enough details to convince us that you can actually find and interview your target participants in the next week.
For example, your target participants should not be “doctors” but instead a specific group of doctors (e.g., Family Practitioners in the UW Roosevelt Clinic). If gaining access to the target participants is non-trivial (e.g., as with busy doctors), describe the steps you have taken to gain access and your plans to recover if you are unable to gain access. Indicate when you will be conducting your three inquiries, being as specific as possible.
In another paragraph, describe how you will interact with your participants and your role as the “apprentice”.
Please be as specific as possible, providing potential examples of your observation focus or interview questions.
No more than one page of text in PDF format. Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/946041/assignments/2741095
In section, be prepared to discuss the plan with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone is worth 0.5% of your total grade and will be graded based on:
Complete at least one contextual inquiry prior to this check-in. You hopefully learned something about the needs of people who might use your design, but also about how to conduct a contextual inquiry.
Describe your first inquiry:
Discuss what remains to be pursued after your first inquiry. We fully expect changes will be necessary, as inquiries can be difficult to get right and often important topics are left unresolved.
No more than one page of text in PDF format. Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/946041/assignments/2741097
In the class, be prepared to discuss your contextual inquiry with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone is worth 0.5% of your total grade and will be graded based on:
Complete as many of your contextual inquiries as possible (at least two, ideally all three). Discuss your process and what you learned:
Across the three inquiries, we expect some emergence of common themes, problems, and practices.
Provide brief answers to the following questions. These should help you begin to identify tasks essential to your design.
Here are the examples discussed in class: Plantr contextual inquiry, Plantr task analysis.
No more than four pages of text in PDF format:
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/946041/assignments/2745015
In the Friday section, be prepared to discuss your contextual inquiry with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone is worth 1% of your total grade and will be graded based on:
Building on what you learned in your contextual inquiry, design six tasks that you believe are integral to your overall design goal:
Each task should be described in text. Tasks say what is accomplished, leaving open how to accomplish it. So be sure that your task conveys a problem and what is accomplished, rather than a step-by-step walkthrough of a particular design.
No more than two pages of text in PDF format:
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/946041/assignments/2748441
In the lecture, be prepared to discuss your tasks with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone is worth 1% of your total grade and will be graded based on whether or not each of the six tasks match the requirements described above.
You have identified and described six important tasks for your design problem. You will now brainstorm and sketch three very different initial designs for your interface:
The purpose of these sketches is to explore the design space before you lock yourself into a single design. They must demonstrate significant consideration of substantially different approaches to your problem.
No more than three pages of text in PDF format:
Images do not count against your page limit, and are therefore effectively free. You should embed images throughout your PDF, keeping them near the text that references them. The limit applies to the approximate amount of text you would have if all images were removed.
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/946041/assignments/2751360
In section, be prepared to discuss your design sketches with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone is worth 1.5% of your total grade.
Two example design check-in submissions from past offerings can be found at these links: Aqueous design check-in, SoundScape design check-in
Prepare a report documenting your process of getting the right design. Your report should follow the outline below, and will be graded using the guidelines that follow. The provided page allocations are estimates, intended to help convey how to divide up the space.
If you completed all of your milestones above, you will have much of the content for this report. But it is critical that you revise and update that content. You have received extensive feedback throughout your design process, and evaluation of your report will include how you have addressed and incorporated that feedback to improve relative to your prior milestones.
Title
A short, creative, and marketable title capturing the key idea.
Each Team Member’s Name and Role
Problem and Solution Overview: (1 paragraph)
A concise statement of the problem you are tackling and a brief synopsis of your proposed solution.
Contextual Inquiry Target, Stakeholders, and Participants: (1 page)
Describe your contextual inquiry, including the participants, their background, and their environment.
Describe why you chose the particular participants in your inquiry.
Contextual Inquiry Results and Themes: (1 page)
Discuss common themes, problems, and practices that emerged in your inquiry.
Include any updated themes that emerged when considering your contextual inquiry in your design process.
Answers to Task Analysis Questions: (2 pages)
Provide brief answers to the task analysis questions.
These should be updated according to your evolved understanding of the problem and your design.
Tasks: (1 page)
Describe six existing or desired tasks, with one paragraph each.
Proposed Design Sketches: (1 page)
Present scanned images of your three initial designs in the context of their four tasks.
Include one paragraph for each design, discussing how it supports your tasks.
Selected design: (0.5 page)
From your three design sketches, select one design that you will refine in the remainder of this course. Then select two tasks that will be the focus of your design refinement. The selected tasks need to be representative of the experience of using your design.
Prepare one paragraph describing why you selected the design you did. Draw upon feedback from critiques and data from your contextual inquiry.
Convey a strong understanding of which design you chose, which tasks you chose, and why you chose them.
Storyboards and Scenarios: (1 page)
Create a storyboard of each of the two tasks for your selected design. These should be done on paper, then scanned (i.e., do not create or recreate them in a drawing package). They should clearly indicate the functionality of the design and what the interface will be like, conveying the major aspects of the design in enough detail that a person not in your group can understand how the design supports each task. As needed, add descriptions that explicitly reference the storyboard, add more sketches, or annotate them in multiple colors.
In addition, convert your two tasks into written scenarios for your design. Scenarios include the steps a person will go through to accomplish the task, including references to your design.
Scenarios do not need to detail every little step, but should be realistic, should be dependent upon the design you have chosen, should appropriately reference elements of your design, and should communicate how a person will accomplish the task using your design.
Ensure your report is appropriately clear and easy to read. This includes:
Be sure your presentation looks good:
No more than eight pages of text in PDF format, following the above outline.
Images do not count against your page limit, and are therefore effectively free. You should embed images throughout your PDF, keeping them near the text that references them. The limit applies to the approximate amount of text you would have if all images were removed.
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/946041/assignments/2752342
This milestone is worth 10% of your total grade.
Prepare a presentation of your process in getting the right design. It should encompass all of your work in Assignment 2.
A suggested organization of this presentation is:
Title:
A short, creative, and marketable title capturing the key idea. Include team member names and roles.
Overall Problem:
Tell this as a story, instead of simply reading the slide. Motivate your audience to be interested in your problem.
Contextual Inquiry:
Include images that give your audience a feeling for your fieldwork. Convey that you have seen and understand the challenge.
6 Tasks:
At most one sentence per task. Convey the breadth of tasks you have considered.
3 Design Sketches:
Convey the breadth of designs you considered.
Selected Design Storyboards and Tasks:
Convey your rationale for choosing a design focus.
Present your storyboards, ensuring they effectively illustrate your selected design and tasks.
Summary:
Summarize the lessons learned in your design process.
We strongly recommend rehearsing your presentation beforehand. For example, arrange to practice together with another group or two, giving each other feedback on your presentations.
Your presentation may be in PPT, PPTX, or PDF format.
To minimize switching time, we will have all presentations on a single laptop running Microsoft Windows. You should optimize your presentation for portability (e.g., ensure any necessary fonts are embedded). If we detect any obvious formatting issues on the presentation machine, we may fix them or contact you to fix them. But you are ultimately responsible for your presentation.
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/946041/assignments/2756424
Presentations will be split across the class time and the two sections. Those teams who are not presenting in the section should still attend the section. The distribution of the teams across class versus sections will be flipped for the final presentation.
Feb 5, Thu, 10:30-11:50am (class)
Feb 6, Fri, 10:30-11:20am (section A)
Feb 6, Fri, 1:30-2:20am (section B)
The presentation is worth 5% of your total grade. The evaluation criteria include the following.
The delivery of this presentation will contribute to the individual presenter’s participation grade (1% of total grade) and will be evaluated based on: