Assignment Overview

Assignment status can be found on the student page which is password protected. You will get the password when you have finished assignment 1.

The assignments in the course include analysis, design and evaluation of a user interface to a system supporting a particular task - work task or other. You do not have to do any programming. You should present your work on your homepage, and your design should later on be evaluated by one of your fellow students. The purpose of this assignments is to give you hands-on experience of the activities, methods and techniques discussed in this course.

Assignment deadlines are published in the schedule.

• Please note that the different assignments (1-5) are linked together and are to be worked with in numerical order.
• You use the same design problem (i.e the context of use and the task that you want to create a user interface for) for all parts of the assignment.
• Try to finish all the lectures before starting assignment 2
• All assignments have to be approved to complete the course.
• You should work with your assignment on your own, and continuously, throughout the course.
• You are recommended to spend about 50% of the total assignment time on assignment 3.
• The assignments make up 2.5 of the 7.5 credits given for the course.

Choose a design problem

The best thing to do is to choose a design problem from a context/environment that you are familiar with and interested in, or something from your work situation. Just because your design proposal results are to be presented on the web, it doesn't mean your design problem has to be a website or something similar. Contrary, we encourage you not to choose "design a website" as a design problem.
Here are some examples of design problems that you can look through to get some inspiration when choosing your design problem. We do encourage you to choose a design problem on your own. If you do, write a brief description of the context and the design problem. Keep in mind that it is essential that you focus on the user interface and the interaction in your design problem. Mail the description to the course assistant or course responsible for further discussion about whether or not it is suitable for the assignment.

Some design problems are way too large to completely cover in a course like this. Therefore you are allowed to restrict your assignment to cover just a certain part of the problem. If you do, carefully explain this restriction when you submit your choice of project.

Publish your design proposal

If you choose to work with an ordinary windows application, a PDA program, some kind of operator interface etc. you can use some kind of image editor (e.g. Photoshop, PaintShopPro, CorelDraw, Illustrator ...) to make interface images. You can also draw interfaces by hand and then photograph or scan them in order to publish them on your website. There are many ways to do this. The most important is that you clearly can explain/express your design proposal and that you do this in a way that makes it possible to evaluate (see assignment 4).

Before you start working with your assignment, we wish to review your choice of design problem. Send an e-mail with a proposition of a design problem to the course assistant or course responsible. Design problems sent in will be reviewed continuously.

Presentation on the web

All course participants should publish their work on their web so that you all can check out the ideas and designs of the other participants. Therefore the text in the assignment / web page is to be written in English and available in text format (i.e. not as vectors or bitmaps). You should publish the results of each part of the assignment on your web page as soon as you are finished with it. You must make the results available on the web if you need help or feedback from us.
Assignments are reviewed by Mikael Laaksoharju. When you publish each assignment on your web page send an e-mail including the address to your web page to .
When you have received the peer evaluation of your project, then add the link to that evaluation on your project webpage.

Supervising

If you need any help with your assignments or choice of design problem, contact the course assistant Mikael Laaksoharju. The other lecturers on the course can provide brief support at their respectively special occasions, preferrably via email.

Suggested reading

In order to complete the assignment successfully you need to make use of all the information provided in the lectures, in the textbook, in the links and other reading material. There are also links provided for each of the different parts of the assignments. Read more in the library.