HCI 440: Usability Engineering
Fall 2004
Assignment 3
Detailed design and prototypes
Due Thursday October 28 for in-class section
Due Sunday October 31 for DL section
Overview
For this assignment, you will create detailed designs realized as
low-to-mid fidelity prototypes. Your designs will include a "home
page" or "main screen" that provides the overall structure of your Web
site as well as one task, or set of related tasks, that you have
identified from your activity design.
Creating design prototypes
Your designs will be realized as a combination of a horizontal
prototype, which shows all of the site's tasks, and a vertical
prototype, which illustrates the design of one task (or set of related
tasks).
For the horizontal prototype, construct at least one screen.
You may consider constructing additional screens if many of your
site's tasks are labeled on a second tier of pages.
For the vertical prototype, construct enough representative screens
to fully show how a task would be completed. These screens might
include dialog boxes, confirmation screens, login windows as well as
the main screen for starting the task.
Possible tools for constructing the layout are HTML, Visual Basic,
Hypercard, drawing programs, or drafting tools. Drawing the screens
by hand is perfectly acceptable. A high-fidelity rendering of your
screen design is NOT the goal here. See Marc Rettig's prototyping
paper for more details on constructing paper prototypes.
Contents of your report
Prepare a report with the following contents:
- Executive summary. This summary is a high-level description
of your product's design. Briefly describe the purpose of the site,
its overall structure and the task you have chosen to prototype. The
summary should be one or two paragraphs in length.
- Conceptual design description. This description is a
summary of the conceptual design from your last project. It includes
a list of high-level content titles and descriptions. To organize
your description, create a navigation chart showing the content
titles for each screen. The description should also include several
paragraphs that describe the chart and explains the task you have
chosen to prototype. This section should not contain any screen
shots.
- Detailed description. Include your paper prototypes here.
Also provide any labels or text to help the reader understand how your
detailed designs relate to your conceptual descriptions.
- Usage scenario. Present a usage scenario of how one of your
users from the previous projects would successfully complete a task
using your detailed design. The usage scenarion should discuss how
the user can apply his or her knowledge and previous experience for
successfully completing the task.
- Usability goals. Provide three usability goals that are
appropriate for your prototype. We will discuss in class good
examples of usability goals.
- Test scenarios. Briefly describe how your team will be able
to use your prototype in testing whether your design meets each of your
usability goals.
- Contribution of team members and their email addresses.
Submission
Ideally, your report should be created entirely as softcopy and
submitted through the DL Web site. Prototype drawings may be scanned
in and included (if used). If necessary, prototypes may be turned in
as hardcopies.
Grading
I will use this grading sheet to
help me review the project.