CS 4324 User Centered Design - Group Project Proposal

Prof. Richard Halstead-Nussloch

Directions: In three or four pages, cover each of the following items about your final group project. If possible, complete as an html file for inclusion on the class web site.

Title

Give your project a meaningful title. Make sure it expresses the key elements of your group's project and product. For example,

Performing surveys on the web.

Team

Describe your team, covering each member and his or her role. Discuss and decide in advance how the team will be led, how you will make decisions, and how you will resolve conflicts. For example:

Project Team
Team MemberRole
John JonesTeam Leader; Documentation
Patty SmithSystem Analyst; Programmer
Jack RabbitRequirements Collection; Usability Professional

We will make decisions by first identifying if we have a consensus. Failing a consensus, we all agree to go with a simple majority (2 of 3). If all three of us have different opinions, the will of the team leader will be accepted.

Introduction

Describe the objectives and product of your project. For example:

The objectives of this project are to:

In the project, we will produce an initial set of web pages with embedded PHP for performing surveys on the web. They will support an effective user interface as tested in our usability evaluations.

User Centered Overview

Describe how you will make this project's development and product centered on the user. Chapters 1-3 of the text should help here.

Systems Engineering Overview

Provide an overview of how your user-centered design will incorporate good aspects of user interface development as described in Chapters 1 and Appendix M by Lewis and Rieman [LEWI94]. For example write a sub-section that covers how your project will have good functionality. Another sub-section should cover standardization, integration, consistency, and portability, etc.

Development Approach

Describe the development process your team will use and your methodology. For example:

In this project, we plan to use the star life-cycle approach as outlined by Preece, Rogers, Sharp, Benyon, Holland, and Carey [PREE94], pages 47-50. Evaluation is the central activity of this approach. We will use the methods of usability engineering (Preece et al. Chapter 31) to complete our evaluations. We will use a standard pencil and paper questionnaire to establish benchmark criteria for our project. Iterations of the online questionnaire should approach the benchmark on the standard measures, e.g., time-on-task, errors, user satisfaction.

Significance and Value

Describe the value of your project and product. Answer the "So what?" question. For example:

Upon completion of this project, the web pages and PHP scripts we produce should be generally usable, and serve as standard programming components to develop an online survey on the web.

References

[LEWI94] Clayton Lewis and John Rieman, Task-Centered User Interface Design. 1994 Shareware available at http://www.hcibib.org/tcuid/index.html
[PREE94]Preece, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., Benyon, D., Holland, S., and Carey, T. Human-Computer Interaction. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.
[SHNE98]Shneiderman, B. Designing the User Interface. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1998.