1. Lectures
Watch the week 5 lecture videos.
2. Reading
Choose 1-2 of the videos or articles from the reading list this week. Enter your reading reflection (250 word max) into the week 5 entry of the design notebook. Put your full name in bracket after the reading reflection paragraph. More details are available under Deliverable 1.c.
3. Acquire Materials for Paper Prototyping
We will be doing paper prototyping next week. For that, you will need paper, pencils, eraser, rulers, glue, scissors, stick notes. Please look into acquiring these materials as soon as possible.
4. Interview 1-2 users
Find a user---someone who is not a student in our CS449/649 class---to interview.
Make sure you obtain their verbal consent responses, and store these responses in a spreadsheet in a password-protected computer, data server or cloud service; the TAs and instructors might ask to see this spreadsheet at a later time. Keep your raw interview data private and viewable to your team only; DO NOT put the raw data (notes and images) in the design notebook. In the design notebook, you just have to summarize your findings from the interviews. Make sure that the data is anonymized and stored in a password-protected computer, data server or cloud service. In the raw data or any report summarizing the data, interviewees should be referred to by their code names (e.g., P1, P16) instead of their real names. For each interview, add a section to the design notebook to capture (1) a summary of your findings, (2) a description of any changes to your interview questions or procedures that you plan to introduce in future interviews based on what you learned.
An important note: your interviewees must be adult (age 19+). Our ethics protocol does NOT allow you to interview children. Note that the definition of minor varies by province. To be safe, interview someone who is 19+. You should also stay away from interviewing students/employees in K-12 schools and hospital staff (e.g., doctor, nurses), because doing so would involve the school board's and the hospital's ethics board. If you were to interview an employee of a company/organization about work-related things, you will also need permission from their manager before conducting the interviews with the employees.
Informational Interviews happen mostly during the week of 3, 4 and 5. You could interview 2-3 users per week; but you can spread out the interviews any way you like! For example, you could do 1 this week, then 3 the following week, and the remaining 2-4 during week 5. It's up to you. Just make sure that in total, you interview 6-8 unique people who are meant to be your target user (people who are likely going to be the primary audience for your app).
5. Design Arguments (Individual + Team)
This design activity involves 4 steps. Preparation: close your eyes and imagine a target user for your application (each team member should choose a different target user). What goal is this user trying to achieve? What are the obstacles that are in his/her way? Provocation: think about as many ideas for features for your app as possible that you think will help this user overcome his/her obstacles. On Miro, put one sticky note per feature. Write as many as possible. Do not judge the ideas that are popping up in your mind. Vote: Get together with your team. You all had different users in mind. Now try to combine your ideas. Look through your team ideas and put a star next to 2 ideas that you like. As a team, choose 4-5 features you all like best. Discuss why you like them the best. Articulate: For each of the chosen features, write down the design argument using the format on slide 8 of the "Design Arguments" lecture. You should have 4-5 design argument statements total per team, one per feature, written up in the design notebook.
6. User Stories (Individual)
Each member of the team choose one of the 4-5 chosen features and create the epic and user stories for that feature. Include a writeup in the design notebook.
7. Crazy 8 (Team)
Do this together in the team meeting. Each person should take a piece of paper, and fold it to make 8 rectangular regions. Each team member pick a feature, and draw 8 sketches of different possible layout and screen organizations for this feature. All team members should be sketching at the same time. Assign one person to manage the timer. The sketching should take 5 minutes total, 40 seconds per sketch. Stop sketching as soon as the time is up. Look through each other’s crazy 8 sheets, and put a star next to 2 layouts that you like. As a team, choose one layout for each feature. Discuss why. Include screenshots of the crazy 8 sheets in the design notebook.
8. Storyboarding (Individual)
Each person takes their feature and corresponding best liked crazy 8 layout, and sketch an actual story about a user's struggle, how that feature on your app will be used to resolve the user's problems, and what is the final outcome. Include details such as: setting (people involved? environment? task being accomplished?), sequence (what steps are involved? what leads someone to use the app? what task is being illustrated?), satisfaction (what’s the motivation for the user? what’s the end result? how does the user feel? what needs are you satisfying?). Include screenshots of the storyboards in the design notebook.
9. Sketches and User Flow (Individual)
Each team member takes one of the 4-5 features that the team identified. Individually, decide on the set of pages / screens that are needed to implement that feature, and sketch out the layout and structure of each page. Make sure you annotate the content and controls of each page in detail. As you are designing, think about signifier, affordance, constraints, feedback, discoverability, mapping, consistency of the interface with the conceptual models of the user.
After designing the screens, place all the screen sketches next to each other. Imagine a user working through a common task on the app and draw user flows. Each person should include (1) a set of screen sketches, (2) a diagram illustrating the user flow between screen sketches, for a particular feature in the design notebook.
When you are doing your sketches, you may be making different versions of the same screen; for example, different students may draw their own home screen. Don't worry about making consistent/coherent designs across teammates yet. It will be an interesting exercise, in week 6-7, to compare all your individual sketches with each other and come up with a coherent design.
10. Challenge Report #2
Complete challenge report #2 in the design notebook. This challenge report focuses on your assumptions about the features that you have chosen to include in your app, and what you have learned through the interviews that challenge these assumptions. Make sure you gather the necessary information from the user interviews in order to answer the questions in the challenge report; you might need to add some new interview questions or modify some existing interview questions in order to do that.
11. Research Proposal (649 Students Only).
Write up a research proposal draft. The research proposal should identify some research questions related to the application that you are designing for this course, describes prior work related to the topic, proposes a study that can address these research questions, and describe why the chosen methodology is appropriate for the research question. The proposal should contain a sketch of the following sections: Introduction (describe what research questions may be interesting to ask given the application that you designed), Related Work (conduct a literature review of prior work related to your research questions and include references/citations), System Description (describe your app, including its functionalities and rationale behind its design), Study Design (Choose 1-2 HCI research methodology and describe in detail a study you can potentially run using the application to answer the research questions). The proposal draft is 2 pages max, not counting references. You must use either LaTex Template and Word template. Put your proposal into PDF format, name the PDF file FirstName_LastName.pdf, then upload the PDF format to vault.
12. Reflect on Survey Results and Draft Action Plan
Early next week, the aggregated team health survey results will be distributed to your team's private Slack channel. As a team, discuss the team health survey results. What is your team doing well vs can improve on? How can your team and your buddy team communicate better and streamline the way you work together? Discuss these questions with your team and buddy team, and draft an action plan in the design notebook to describe the concrete steps your team will take to improve the work processes within your team and with your buddy team.
Due Friday (June 11)
● Design Notebook Entry (1.c, 3.b) - the entry should capture your attendance to team meeting, your individual reflection, the documentation of your design activities (including design arguments, user stories, crazy 8, storyboarding, sketches and user flow).
● User Interviews (3.a) - complete the writeup by adding a section to your design notebook week 5 entry.
● Challenge Report #2 (3.c) - complete the writeup in the design notebook.
● Research Proposal 2-page Draft (CS 649 students only) - submit PDF to course gmail.
● Team Monitoring (1.b) - reflect on survey results and draft action plan