Interaction Design Midterm Projects!

Part1:

Planning

• Before you begin, interview your client. The meeting should include at least two members of your group, and at least two members of your client group.
  
  
  • Discuss the project's overall philosophic goals. What is it trying to accomplish in the world? Identify what problem space they have decided to take on within that goal.
    
    
  • Walk through the current version of your client's project, be it mockups, code, userflows, or still conceptual. Assuming the project is transactional, not informational, what mental model of interaction are they using? How literal or abstract is their mental model?
    
    
• Is the use of their interactive "handles" and cues obvious or does it or do they require overt instructions? Does the project use persuasion to get it's point across, or does it resort to telling it's users what to do?
  
  
  • What are the sample personas your clients imagine using this project? Get as specific as possible. What scenarios do they imagine them going through?
    
    
  • What cognitive processes is this interface attempting to support?

Requirements

• Find examples of people who fall into the types of personas that your client has indicated are their target users.
  
  
• Using at least one method of data gathering (simple interviews email, phone, or in-person interviews, questionnaires, or polls, or researching reactions similar products) find out their Goals, Frustrations, and Motivations in relation to this type of interaction. You can include this as part of your usability test, or make it a separate step beforehand with different test subjects.

Formative Evaluation

• Complete a thorough Heuristic Test of the project's interface. If it's a digital interface, you can perform it on the website. If it's a physical design Doing a heuristic test before the User test will help you know what questions to ask, and give clues as to why something might not be working.
  
  
  • Use Neilsen's 10 Usability Heuristics and your Interface Design Manual to ferret out potential design issues. What heuristics is the interface accomplishing well, and which is it missing? Remember, as the designer, you have the right to decide certain heuristics don't pertain to this project. You also have the right to add additional heuristics that aren't generally used.
    
    
• -Complete a Usability Test on the client's project
  
  
  • Create your questions for a usability test. Remember to include your disclaimer, background questions, overall impression questions and short answer questions, and most importantly, your walk through and wishlist questions.
    
    
  • Test at least 5 users on the existing tool. Keep in mind that this is a Formative, not Summative evaluation. You may need to use mockups, wireframes, or even abstract questions, rather than a completed project, to test your users.

Analysis

• In light of the heuristic and user test, how effective is this tool in accomplishing the creator's stated philosophic goals? Where did they succeed and where was there a mismatch?
  
  
  • Does the interface successfully support the cognitive processes that it was created for?
    
    
  • How accurate were the user scenarios that they imagined occurring? How closely did they resemble the actual uses by real users?
    
    
  • What Use Cases are missing from the project? What functionality or abilities does the user want or need to be able to accomplish that are not currently available? You may want to create a userflow diagram of the current functionality, and then diagram out how the new functionality might fit.
    
    
  • What specific interface problems does the project suffer from?

Part 2

Design

Taking into account the functionality and usability issues, and new Use Cases you have identified, redesign this project to better suit the project's philosophic goals. Your mission is to create userflow diagrams, basic wireframes, mockups, more advanced prototypes, or any other materials you can imagine that would make your case for change to a reluctant Client. You can even run some user testing on your new materials to prove they are an improvement. You can tackle this issue a number of different ways.

• If you feel that that the project's mental model and design is fundamentally sound in solving for the problem space , your job is to make your case for any additional new functionality and interface design updates needed.
  
  
• If you feel that the mental model is sound but the implementation is flawed in terms of not realizing the model's full potential, your job is to completely redesign the user user interface for this project to better serve the users needs. Make sure that you show examples of all aspects of the new interface.
  
  
• If you feel that the wrong mental model was chosen to reach the project goals, your job is to redesign this project from the concept up. Remember, if you choose this option you will need to make a strong case that the project's interaction with the users itself could be accomplished better in a completely different way.

Midterm Presentation: Be prepared to present your case for change to this project. Persuade the class That this project is not reaching it's full potential and offer us your solution by include an overview of the project, the findings from your planning, requirements, formative evaluation, and analysis, and your proposed design concepts. Each group will also need to select two representatives to present their case in front of the client groups.