Assignment 3: Design

You should present on your web page:

• A written scenario or a storyboard scenario describing how your system or product may be used,
• A design of a prototype supporting the scenario
• QOC documentation of the design.

You should think through your design carefully and try to make it usable. Make sure that your design is presented in such a way that it is easy to understand and evaluate (by a fellow student in assignment 4). The prototype must be detailed enough so that it can be evaluated together with a user. The presentation should contain pictures and/or sketches, together with text explaining the interaction.

Complement the design with one or more scenarios and the documentation of some of the important design decisions. The design process must be iterative and should be documented. Use QOC to document your design decisions.

You can use any techniques and tools you like for your design: sketches, post-it notes, whiteteboard, powerpoint or other computer-based tools, web pages or any kind of programming tools. Below are some more examples. As long as they allow you to focus on the design, and not on the technique or tool itself. The purpose of the design assignment is to design, not to learn Java or Photoshop. The tool must be simple and quick to use since each iteration should be relatively short in time. You should avoid investing too much time and effort in your design solution, since you may have to discard it and start on a new one.

Start out by using simple, pen-and-paper based techniques, such as whiteteboard, post-it notes and sketches. If you want to, you can implement your final solution in, e.g. html or powerpoint, but it is no requirement. The main thing is that the design conveys your design ideas clearly and that it is well documented. You must explain the design in terms of the interaction and how it is supposed to work.

It must be possible to post your design solutions on your web page. If you use paper-based sketches you will have to scan or photograph them.

Some things to keep in mind when you are designing your prototype:

• In design, there is never any right or wrong answers. Each design problem can be solved in an endless number of ways. It is, however, important to compare the pros and cons of the different solutions to see if one is better than the other.
• Subjective opinion about good or bad design should never replace sound HCI knowledge for a particular problem. Make use of what you have learned in the course.
• If other people choose the same design problem, you should see their work as a resource rather than competition. Nevertheless, your work must be your own!!!
• You cannot know until you start designing, whether or not the information you collected during analysis is sufficient and adequate. If not, you will have to go back and do some more analysis.
• The single most effective way of testing your design is to use real users in the evaluation. And remember that, no matter what, you are never a representative user yourself (unless you are the only user of your system/product).
• Spend more time designing the interaction and user interface and less time implementing it. There are other courses for that.

Suggested reading

• QOC, Questions, Options, Criteria
• Lecture 8, Human-computer interaction - techniques, principles, metaphors, models
• Lecture 9
• Lecture 11 Design of user interfaces; about design heuristics and design documentation

Examples of design tools

• Gliffy An free online tool for design of diagram and simple GUI:s
• Axure RP Pro 4 A 30 day trial of a web page prototyping tool