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 design research, task development, generating multiple potential designs, and finally selecting a design to pursue.
This assignment is worth 20 out of 100 points of your overall course grade:
This is a group assignment, consisting of nine milestones.
Assignment 2a: Project Ideation
Due: Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Assignment 2b: Design Research Plan
Due: Friday - April 19, 2019
Assignment 2c: Design Research Check-In
Due: Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Assignment 2d: Design Research Review
Due: Monday - April 29, 2019
Due: Wednesday - May 1, 2019
Assignment 2f: Design Check-In (“3x4”)
Due: Friday - May 3, 2019
Assignment 2g: Design Review (“1x2”)
Due: Wednesday - May 8, 2019
Due: Friday - May 10, 2019
In this assignment, you will brainstorm a large set of possible tasks and design ideas for your project. You will then conduct design research 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 design research 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.
More specifically, you will do the following:
Generate ideas for potential problems, tasks, features, and interactions using a group ideation exercise.
Conduct design research (e.g., contextual inquiry, interviews, observations) to learn from at least three people who might use your design.
(Assignment 2b), (Assignment 2c), (Assignment 2d)
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 sufficiently 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.
Due: Tuesday, April 16, 2019
The goal of this assignment is to begin thinking about how to plan effective design research to inform your design process.
Generate 5 to 10 different ideas related to each of the following aspects of your project proposal:
Divide a large sheet of paper into 32 squares (or take two sheets of paper with 16 squares on each), each approximately 2in by 2in. Sketch your ideas, one in each square. Each idea should be either a quick doodle with a caption or a one-sentence idea. A person familiar with your project but not in your group should be able to understand the idea each sketch conveys.
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.
Given a space of possible directions, your project needs to begin to gather information on how to generate and consider ideas. While brainstorming design ideas consider the following in your design: People: the user group you have decided to focus on. Also include other types of people you might work with. Foci: potential foci you might apply in your learning.
For the submission, capture and submit legible images of your brainstorm and, on the same PDF file, shortly describe (in 1 or 2 sentences) the 3-5 ideas the team consider more exciting. Please, focus on clarifying what the team wants to convey with that idea, for example: Idea one proposes a wearable device to use around the neck that will read the muscles to identify where the head is facing.
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1271349/assignments/4770559
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 1 points based on the ideas generated.
Due: Friday - April 19, 2019
In one paragraph, describe the people who might use your design and other stakeholders for your design. Describe the particular design research methods and participants you plan to pursue, including such details as their background and the environment where you will observe their current practices. Give enough information to convince us that you can actually find and engage with your target participants in the next week.
Be precise! 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 already taken to gain access and your plans to recover if you are unable to gain access. Indicate when you will be conducting your design research, being as specific as possible.
In another paragraph, describe the ideal design research you would conduct. For this, list at least 3 research methods that would help you to engage with and learn from these people.
In the final paragraph, describe which research method you will focus on for the purpose of this class (usually this will be one of the research methods listed in the second paragraph, but in some cases, you might decide that a fourth research method is more realistic). Describe why you chose this method for your user research plan.
No more than one page of text in PDF format. Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1271349/assignments/4770560
In section, check with the course staff and be prepared to discuss your design research.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 2 points:
Due: Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Complete design research with at least one participant prior to this check-in. You hopefully learned something about the needs of people who might use your design, but also about effectively conducting your design research.
Describe your first design research participant and your findings:
Discuss what remains to be pursued in your additional design research. We fully expect changes will be necessary, as design research 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/1271349/assignments/4770561
Names of participants should be replaced with pseudonyms in all documents. It is important to protect participant anonymity, even in the case that reporting seems harmless.
In class and section, be prepared to discuss your design research with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 2 points:
Due: Monday - April 29, 2019
Complete design research with at least three participants. Discuss your process and what you learned:
Across your participants, we expect some emergence of common themes, problems, and practices.
If you are having trouble identifying high-level themes, problems, and practices, it may indicate a need to develop additional understanding through more design research. Because your findings at this point are critical to setting a foundation for your project, ensure your design research has provided you the insights and perspective you need to proceed.
Informed by your design research, provide brief answers to the following questions. These should help you begin to identify tasks essential to your design.
No more than four pages of text in PDF format:
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1271349/assignments/4770562
Names of participants should be replaced with pseudonyms in all documents. It is important to protect participant anonymity, even in the case that reporting seems harmless.
In lecture, check with the course staff and be prepared to discuss your design research.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 2 points:
Due: Wednesday - May 1, 2019
Building on what you learned in your design research, 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 scenario with a particular design.
No more than two pages of text in PDF format:
Submit via Canvas here:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1271349/assignments/4770563
In section, be prepared to discuss your tasks with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 2 points:
Due: Friday - May 3, 2019
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/1271349/assignments/4770564
In lecture, check with the course staff and be prepared to discuss your designs.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 4 points:
Due: Wednesday - May 8, 2019
From your 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 design research.
Convey a strong understanding of which design you chose, which tasks you chose, and why you chose them.
Then create a storyboard of each task 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.
No more than one page 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/1271349/assignments/4770565
In section, be prepared to discuss your choices and storyboards with other teams and the course staff.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 2 points:
Due: Friday - May 10, 2019
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(s)
Problem and Solution Overview: (1 paragraph)
A concise statement of the problem you are tackling and a brief synopsis of your proposed solution.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants: (1 page)
Describe your design research, including the participants, their background, and their environment.
Describe why you chose the particular methods and participants in your design research.
Design Research Results and Themes: (1 page)
Discuss common themes, problems, and practices that emerged in your design research.
Include any updated themes that emerged when considering your design research 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.
Proposed Design Sketches - “3x4”: (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.
Include one paragraph discussing your choice of design and tasks to further pursue.
Written Scenarios - “1x2”: (1 page)
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.
Storyboards of the Selected Design
Include updated storyboards of your design. Reference these appropriately in your scenarios.
Ensure your report is appropriately clear and easy to read. This includes:
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/1271349/assignments/4770566
Names of participants should be replaced with pseudonyms in all documents. It is important to protect participant anonymity, even in the case that reporting seems harmless.
This report will be graded on a scale of 5 points: