Assignment 5

Final Project Preliminary Paper Prototype Design

Due Tuesday October 16, beginning of class

Individual assignment (Please note the change from the syllabus)
 

It's time to propose a project idea. Your goal is to to use storyboards and/or paper prototypes to describe your concept as fully as you can. You may need to combine some of the techniques that have been discussed in class and in the design readings.

Start by taking the feedback from Assignments 2 and 3 and your 1 minute-madness reaction into account. Double down efforts to come up with a great idea and have the courage to throw out ideas that are not getting a good reaction. Napkin discussions with friends are helpful here.

When you have ideas on how to improve on your prior idea, build a paper prototype for your app concept following the Rettig articles and the tips discussed in class. Assume you have a screen no larger than the screen on a Nexus S phone. Ideally, you would design for the smallest screen you might encounter (an Aria phone with 320 x 480 pixels (template)). The reason designing for a small screen is helpful is it forces you to think VERY hard about what information really needs to be on the screen at any particular time. That will make your app better.

Run some paper prototyping sessions with friends, ideally friends not in computing. Adjust your prototype using the techniques discussed in class and iterate to an improved idea. Scrap bad ideas. Do this until you are satisfied that you have a terrific idea that does not make unreasonable assumptions about what people will or won't do, and an idea that you believe is implementable and testable. Remember that grad students must have an idea that uses sensors in an novel way. Your design should handle all screens in your app that are necessary for your app to work. If you use audio feedback, you will need to indicate how the audio feedback will work in as much detail as you would do if it were visual feedback.

Clean up your paper prototypes so they are ready to be used in class on Tue Oct 16.

Create a storyboard so that someone reading your assignment will understand how the app is used, and then provide the following information to hand in as part of your PDF document:

• Class project category ... one and only one!
  (one of Get Moving!, Sit to Stand, Hand Hygiene, Killer Exergame, Dietary Assessment, Stressed Out, Portion Control, Life Labeling, Sleep Quality, Sleep Deprivation, Bluetooth Beacons)
• App name (Max 30 characters, including spaces)
• App description that would appear on the Market (Max 4000 characters, including spaces). This description should be something that is appropriate for the app store. It should describe the app succinctly and catch someone's attention. It should clearly get across what is interesting/novel about the app. It should not state that the app is "easy" or "fun" but instead describe behavior that sounds easy or fun. Describe, don't tell. There should be no typos in this description.
• A slogan or promotional saying that would appear on the Market (Max 80 characters, including spaces)
• Application Type (pick either "Applications" or "Games")
• Category (specify one of the categories on the Market)
• Who are your target users of the application?
• What is the problem your app will solve for those users better than alternative solutions?
• List the five most innovative competitor apps on the Play Store or iTunes store that attempt to solve the problem that your app attempts to address.
• What are the top potential weaknesses of your application idea and how will you address them?
• How will you thoroughly test your app once it is built?

Attach scans of your storyboard (which will include parts of the paper prototype). These will need to be a combination of mock (sketched) screen shots where you will need to label just enough so someone else can tell how the app would work. No screens that you would need to implement should be left out.

Do:

• Think through the details of ALL of the screens someone would encounter
• Aim for innovation but also simplicity in design -- do a smaller number of things extremely well versus creating feature bloat
• Show how your app will deal with noisy sensing or people not behaving as you want them to
• Use the unique functionality of mobile devices
• Keep in mind the design principles we've discussed in class and that have been in the readings
• Remember that you are proposing to implement what you propose -- keep it manageable

Do not:

• Use a computer to draw designs in the paper prototype... sketch screens by hand, without a ruler
• Oversimplify the behavior of your users or underestimate the difficulty of achieving behavior change
• Propose ideas that require a large amount of high-quality content to be generated in order to be interesting (unless you will be able to generate example content to be used to evaluate your project) .

Email your assignment to Elica and ...@neu.edu as a PDF file named [YourFirstName][YourLastName].assign5.pdf by the deadline.