Assignment 5: Final Project Individual Paper Prototype Design

Due Mon Feb 11, beginning of class (to be used in class)
 

This is your last chance to show your work as an individual when it comes to the design aspects of the course. By this time, you should have evolved towards having a single idea that has a great deal of potential as a final project app. This assignment is designed to help you further refine that design.

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 that 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 for paper prototype testing. We will do an in-class exercise and your project idea may be selected as an example.

In addition to your paper prototype parts, on a single page, include the following information:

• Class project category ... one and only one!
• App name (Max 30 characters, including spaces)
• App description that would appear on the Market (Max 4000 characters, including spaces, usually a lot less). 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)
• Who are your target users of the application?

Attach scans of all parts of your paper prototype and the single page above. No screens that you would need to implement should be left out of your design proposal. If it is not obvious how the parts go together, you should add a small amount of additional information.

Do:

• Follow the advice and proceedure in the Rettig article and test your idea by running test users through your paper prototype (ideally your test users should be people not in computer science and engineering!)
• 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
• Remember that the more you improve your idea now, the more likely that you will end up with a fantastic (and implementable) final project

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 Mansoor and ...@neu.edu as a PDF file named [YourFirstName][YourLastName].assign5.pdf by the deadline.