For this team project, you will conduct interviews to learn about the users and tasks for a proposed root concept.
The ultimate goal for your projects in this course is to specify task needs and user information for an interactive product in a domain of your choice. Initially, you may have some ideas of what this product will do and who will use this product. These ideas are your root concept. In some ways, it's helpful to think of your root concept in terms of the domain (e.g. sports league, distance learning, apartment hunting, condo association), target users (e.g. Chicago coffee drinkers, Commerce majors at DePaul) and problems you would like to solve (e.g. scheduling games, posting teaching materials, comparing apartments, announcing events and policies). The resulting interactive product should address these problems within your chosen domain.
Your first step is determine your root concept. You should have a general idea of how the resulting product will be useful for its users, but many of the functional details will be determined later as you conduct your research. When deciding on your concept, you should consider whether its users and other stakeholders will be accessible to your team.
Develop a detailed research plan. Generally you should consider the following:
For the interviews, plan on interviewing at least two users per team member and at least 6 users in total. A reasonable interview length for this project is a half hour.
The details and type of interview (e.g. contextual inquiry) should be decided by the team and documented in the method.
You should plan on producing a type of user profile (e.g. personas and scenarios) as part of your presentation strategy. In addition, incorporate at least one additional presentation strategy (e.g. task-user matrices, feature lists, task diagrams, concept prototypes).
For the second team project, you will select at least two additional research methods (e.g. surveys, user shadowing, focus groups) and revise your findings accordingly.
Use this schedule for conducting the first team project:
During the first week, each individual should propose a candidate root concept and a brief plan for conducting the user research. By the second week, someone from your team should email me your root concept and research plan.
Individual notes from interviews must be posted on COL by Tuesday October 12 (Friday October 15 for online students). If your notes are not posted by this date, your team members do not have an obligation to use your results for the submitted report.
While not required, your team should consider using an online document editing tool such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets. If you do use such a tool, I would appreciate being invited as a viewer.
The report should have the following goals:
While important, the second and third items can be addressed later in the report. In contrast, the first item should be immediately accessible to the reader. Possible strategies for presenting information for the first goal vary. I recommend that you consider strategies from the following list and choose a subset that best fits your project:
As previously noted, at least one presentation method should involve some variant of personas and usage scenarios.
We will discuss these strategies in class. Other than some form of user profiles (e.g. personas), you are not required to use any particular strategy, but you should employ a variety.
Also, include in your report a summary of how team members contributed to the project.
There is no specific report format, but it should follow the principles discussed in class and presented in Kuniavsky.
Please place all contents in one document using a common format (e.g. Word, PDF, RTF, HTML). Submit this document through the COL Web submission site under the name of one team member.
In addition to completeness, I will consider the following issues when grading the reports: