IS U570 Human Computer Interaction -- Fall 2004 - Futrelle

IS U570 Human Computer Interaction -- Fall 2004 - Project #1 Final Report

A major point: I need to understand the designs and design details you considered and why you chose the ones you finally did. Please describe how you thought through your design -- what you considered, what you threw away, and what you finally chose, especially why you did these things. When you're discussing your reasoning, refer to specific points that the book makes that support your decisions.

Some of the requirements of the previous item can be helped by keeping a diary of your work, especially with notes about considerations and decisions. You can then use the diary to write up notes on why you chose to do what you did.

It is also important that you do your best to explain what each of the two partners did. In addition to your joint report, include two separate paragraphs, each written by the respective partners, that explain the contributions of each partner.

Review the guidelines for the first handin of the project. The notes here augment those earlier guidelines.

Reread various sections of your textbook to be sure you haven't missed anything important that will help make your project a success.

Try to flesh out your original project to one that could actually be of value or utility to some class of users. This means giving it some special functionality, or backing it with useful data.

Carefully identify all documents, pages, hardcopy, etc. that you hand in with your names, date, class, etc.

The user needs help up front to tell him/her what your application is all about, as well as getting some details about how to use it.

The various sections of your report need to be written for different audiences. The initial overview should be for a non-technical person. The user material should be written in a style and at a level appropriate to whatever class of users you expect to have. The more technical aspects of the implementation should be written assuming that the reader is a CS or IS student, but not one in this HCI class. Do not write the report for me, Professor Futrelle, but for these other audiences.

I have found that the web-based project write-ups are the most successful - along with your working application, of course. The web allows you to link parts of your application together with appropriate graphics. Graphics placed in Word documents does not always display properly on all platforms and Word versions. I have found that doing an insert (not a paste) of a tiff file into Word gives good results for me. Be sure to put your project on a reliable server, e.g., CCIS, and check all URLs that you send that reference your project location.

Since this is your final version of Project #1, you should be specific in discussing various points about usability. For example, don't say that you chose label names carefully, but say just what the labels are that you chose and why those specific labels are good choices.

Another aspect of specificity is to refer to specific sections and pages of your textbook. You might even find that one or two of the papers referenced in the book seems particularly appropriate. Many such papers can be found in the ACM or IEEE sections of the NU Library, on-line.

Buzzwords are not sufficient. For example, it's one thing to mention short-term or long-term memory. It's another to point out specific design decisions and those in the final design that depend on these memory modes and how you avoided overtaxing the memory systems.

There are a number of technical terms and concepts introduced in the textbook. You should indicate that you understand them by using them correctly in specific and appropriate contexts.

As one of the many things you need to keep in mind, pay attention to the cancel and reset operations you allow your users, so they won't feel "trapped".

It is important that you carry out an evaluation of your system. Try to find a friend or friends who are not CS or IS students. The tests can be short and straightforward, but they should demonstrate that you can do such an evaluation and interpret it and write it up clearly. There is a good deal of material in Chapter 4 on this.

You might want to try to capture, save, and summarize the interactions in your system, e.g., how many times a particular button was pressed. You could simply record the sequence of actions without any concern for timing. Beyond that you could record the time so you could get the intervals between various actions. Logging the time is simple, as this example from the Java Developer's Almanac shows. Since a log of all action sequences can be difficult to read and interpret (even more so if timings are involved) you should study them and summarize them.

The grammars and transition diagrams of Chapter 5 should at least be discussed, if not actively used in your project. If you find it awkward to create transition diagrams for your document or web page, feel free to draw your diagrams by hand on paper and hand those in, properly identified.

Chapter 6 on Direct Interaction will be covered before your report is due. But putting direct interaction into your system in the form of selecting rotations or regions or dragging or drawing with the mouse is not required. You're welcome to try! There are lots of examples out there. See the "DragKing" example that I reference on this graphics page.