For many of the class readings, I will have questions that everyone should respond to on the shared discussion board. These reflections are meant as a way to encourage reflection on and to fuel further class discussion about the readings. Responses need not be long (1-2 paragraphs is fine), but should provide indicate your personal reflections on the reading and prompting questions. Submit your responses by 10am the day of class.
For this assignment, create a poster for two persona who represent potential users for your design. Think of this poster as something that would go up in the room of designers and programmers who are developing your system. The team should be able to connect with these people and be able to draw conclusions about how he/she would interact with the system. The persona should be a fictionalized character but should have some charcteristics that relate to information or observations related to your target users. Present the personas in class.
Each team member should create three different designs for one component of your design project. Remember that the idea is to encourage divergent thinking. Bring in those designs to class and we will have a group design session. Build upon your personas and your value-sensitive scenarios to create a final design. from assignment #4,. Your choice of how to describe your design should match your design problem. The design could include storyboarding the interaction for your system, sketches for an interface, etc.
Final design project presentations
The presentations should be approximately 25 minutes with 10 minutes for questions for each team--up to a maximum of 35 minutes for both presentation and questions. Every team member should be involved in some part of the presentation. Practice and time your presentations to make sure that they do not exceed the maximum time. Developing strong presentation skills is one of the best things you can do for your career - no matter what your career turns out to be.
While your fellow students are presenting, I'd like each of you to fill out an evaluation form for their presentations. Each person will get a style component, but the content will be based on the entire team's presentation. I'll bring these forms to class. Please provide constructive feedback to help your classmates improve their presentation skills. The forms will look largely like the grading rubric with room for constructive feedback.
Every team is expected to do a user-cented evaluation of their design. I expect the evaluation to include the same number of users as there are team members (e.g., a 3-person team should evaluate their design with 3 different users). Otherwise, you have complete flexibility in how you choose to implement that user-centered evaluation. For example, you could show each user a series of paper prototypes where you assign them tasks to accomplish and have them "use" it and depending on what they choose present them with another paper prototype as if they were using it interactively on a computer. For other options, you could come up with a set of questions that you want to ask the user about the prototype or use a set of heuristics for them to base their assessment of the interface upon. There were a number of approaches from the readings and from our discussions in class. You can choose what fits best with your project and design. Information about your user-centered evaluation should be included in your final project presentation.