Human-Computer Interaction

20% of your final grade

Project #2

Assigned: Monday 2/8/2010

Part A: Proposal Due (50 points): 2 PM Friday, 2/19/2010

Part B: Interface Due (50 points): 2 PM Friday, 3/5/2010

 

GREEN - Undergraduate requirements

BLUE - graduate requirements

 

Part A: Propose Interface (50 points)

Write a proposal for your final project 4 pages - 12 point font, single space, 1” margins)

 

A. Background research - 25 points

Write a description of the topic you are addressing, including:

1. Describe the interface problem (1 paragraph) (5 points)

Grading Criteria:

·       Clearly stating the issue with the existing interface.  Give more detail than ‘hard for user to navigate’, etc. 

·       Identify why you think improving the interface would address the issues.

2. Motivate why this topic is important (1 paragraph) (5 points)

Grading Criteria:

·       Scope of the issue (who is affected by it and how)

·       Motivation that the interface is the hindrance

3. Integrate a minimum of (UG: 2, G: 3) scientific literature references (15 points) that support your choice of topic and your approach to improving the interface.  The references should explain deficiencies or considerations in existing interfaces.   Use technical conference and journals (e.g. SIGCHI, UIST, and book chapters) publications, not PCMagazinewww.hcibib.org is a good place to start.  You must use papers not used in the class reading assignments.  For each paper, write at least 1 paragraph that encapsulates the citation’s results and at least 1 paragraph on how it affected your design decisions.

Grading Criteria:

·       Quality of papers

·       Summarization of paper

·       Applicability to your project

·       Impact on your design

 

B. Define project - 25 points

A. Find A Client (10)

Identify their issues with the interface (get at least UG: 1 of, G: 2 of):

1.     3 personal quotes from clients

2.     Cite 2 papers [these papers are not the same as above, and instead can be non-scientific in nature, e.g. a newspaper article on the difficulty for the elderly to use voting machines]

3.     Do a focus group of at least 10 people from the population [bonus 10 points]

Grading Criteria:

·       Ability to obtain supporting evidence (quotas, papers, focus group)

·       Analysis of what the clients are saying about the interface

·       You should turn in as an appendix to your project: (not part of the 4 pages), interviews with the clients, transcript of the focus group

 

B. Proposed Interface Design (15)

 Describe your design and discuss it leverages the literature references from the background research

Grading Criteria:

·       Interface redesign rationale

·       Integration of cited papers

 

Part B. Build Interface (50 points)

A.    Present the new interface (30 points) <- 5 minute presentation to TA and myself

Grading Criteria: completeness (20 points), proper usage of guidelines/principles (10 points)

B.    Turn in report (2 pages, double spaced, 20 points):

·       User and Task Analysis (Box 1.1 in book) (5 points)

·       Applicability of 8 golden rules (10 points)

·       Discuss interface choice (5 points)

 

 

 

 

I expect the scope of building an interface to be larger for graduate students.  I anticipate building the interface to take about 20 hours for an undergraduate, 30 hours for a graduate student.

 

You must build a new interface, not simply move things around in an old interface.

IRB and consent forms will be done in the next assignment

You can work on existing research or other class projects, but cannot get double credit for the same work (“double dip”). 

You can work together on the same system, but only if you each of you work on a separate interface

 

Finding papers - The best way to find papers are:

    1. Google online for conference papers at the major conferences, SIGCHI, UIST, SIGGRAPH, I3D, IEEE VR, etc.

    2. Look at the each chapter's reference list

    3. Look at similar related papers and look at their reference list.  Google on them

 

Issue Selection Questions:

Overall Approach:
1) Identify a client population (be very specific... e.g. not novices, but novices at email who are unfamiliar with any email client)
2) Identify what the problem is with the existing interface (only choose one thing, and be specific again... not just 'it is confusing')
3) Read papers to identify other prior approaches
4) Integrate those ideas into a proposed solution

    What makes a good issue?  Something you are passionate about! 

 

Possible Projects:

    Ex. Think of friends with disabilities and help them address a daily activity with which they currently have problems. (Create your own interface)

    Ex. Designing voting devices for the elderly (Create your own interface)

    Ex. Evaluate spoken words vs. tones for PDA navigation (Evaluate interface)

    Ex. Design a hands-free interface for web browsing (Create your own interface)

    Ex. Create an art project that has projector based fish swimming around a person feed from a webcam (Create your own interface)

    Ex. Explore the task performance enhancement by providing multimodal vs. unimodal data (Evaluate interface)

 

Finding clients: You must use participants from your target demographic (e.g. elderly, children).  Doing so requires significant planning, and discuss with me about if your project requires a very specific demographic. 

 

Hardware Questions:

    What happens if I need really expensive hardware?  Contact me.  The projects built here can be thought of as prototypes.  But do consider using a variety of interesting devices including:

·        PDAs

·        Cellphones

·        Webcams

·        Projectors

·        Audio (spatialized)

·        3D Graphics

·        Virtual people

·        Engineering your own

 

There are free libraries available for:

·        Speech Recognition

·        3D Graphics

·        3D Audio

·        PDA connectivity

·        Webcams (you should probably already have had a course in image processing)