Project 4: Everyday Rich Social Communication
The final project theme continues what we have been thinking about in P2 and P3 – Everyday Rich Social Communication: Enabling new applications for staying connected. For the rest of the quarter you will iteratively design, prototype, and evaluate a new application that involves everyday social communication via rich media. You are free to choose any application area.
- By everyday we don't literally mean daily, but should be something frequently and regularly included into normal practice. This not only makes it more likely to have a bigger impact in people's lives, but also makes it easier to do authentic user studies if it doesn't involve some special occasion (e.g., weddings, being on vacation).
- By rich media we mean using pictures, audio, video, smell, touch, something that goes beyond just text to communicate.
- Must be computer-mediated communication
Topics of interest might include communication among friends, among family, with kids, with the elderly, between customers and providers, providing technical support, cross-cultural, cross-time zone, with the blind, with the deaf, with pets, with deities, etc. While you are welcome to build on ideas you identified in P2 and P3, we view those as exercises intended to help you explore the design space rather than lock you into any perspective.
Several factors are important in thinking about your project:
- User-centered design. Your application should meet a real-world need identified through your observations and experience. You may wish to engage in additional interviews or observation to inform your project's development. Make sure your choice of target users is realistic for the course. Designing for astronauts sounds great, but it may be hard to evaluate your designs if you don't work at NASA. Pick a problem and demographic with which you can meaningfully engage.
- Human context. We want this project to have a plausible story about the people who would use it, the benefit they would get from it, and the way it would fit into their lives. This includes testing your prototypes with users who are representative of your target audience.
- Functional implementation. As a computer science course, one goal of CS247 is to realize your design in a working system. "Crazy" ideas are encouraged, but you must be able to instantiate them in a fully functional prototype. The primary steps are paper and/or video prototyping, implementing an operational software prototype that illustrates and tests some aspect of the larger picture, user testing that prototype, and then refining that prototype into an improved, deployable system.
Activities and Deliverables
The final project is organized into iterative cycles, with feedback in each. We will have a set of major milestones each week, spelled out below. The Final Project is worth 55% of your grade, and the breakdown for each milestone is given (in parantheses). You are responsible for keeping a project web page that will be updated with new pages and content for each project milestone.
| April 17 | Milestone 1: Team Formation and
Ideating (3%) Form project teams. Choose a name for your project and create your initial project web site. Host your website and code using the CS247 organization on GitHub. Contact the staff with all of the GitHub usernames of your group members, and the desired name of your repository, and we'll add you to the organization. Set up your own GitHub and link to it on your project website. Use GitHub features (including wiki pages and issue tracking) to help coordinate your work! In the past, it's been helpful to make sure that specific roles are covered in your work as a team. While all team members can (and should!) contribute across all activities, it will be useful to identify who will take responsibility for the following specific aspects of the project:
Ideate around project problem. Do some brainstorming around the project idea, generate some lists, combine ideas, refine. Go for quantity and document by taking (legible) pictures of whiteboards, lists, or managing ideas in a computer-based program. Identify 3 possible project ideas with a paragraph describing who the target users are, what communication need it addresses, and what context they would use this tool. Submit these three ideas for feedback from the teaching team. Deliverable: Use the P4 Google Form to submit your initial homepage with the team description, documentation of brainstorming, and three project ideas by 12:00 noon on Thur 4/17. |
| April 24 | Milestone 2: Storyboarding and Skit (4%)
Prototyping through storyboards and skits. As described in class and in the assigned reading, prototypes can take many forms, including sketches, video, interface mockups (including paper prototypes), and technical feasibility tests. We want you to explore some prototype concepts through storyboarding and acting out a skit. Based on feedback that you got on your M1 ideas, develop a storyboard for UX of three different ideas. Pick one and develop a one-minute skit that acts out the process of using the tool in context. Create a new page on your team website describing your prototyping work and link to it from your project homepage. Meet your external project coach. Each team will be paired up with a project "coach" - a professional designer and/or researcher who can help you think through your project ideas and provide feedback. We will be having an initial kick-off meeting at the CS247 lab: Wed 4/23, 6-8pm at the d.school atrium during the Lab time slot. Every team is invited to attend, and make sure at least one member of each team attends; refreshments will be provided. Deliverable: Your three storyboards should be posted on your website by 12:00 noon on Thur 4/24. One-minute skit will be acted out in class on Thur 4/24. |
| May 1 | Milestone 3: Wizard-of-Oz Testing (5%) Design a Wizard-of-Oz test. Building on your prototyping results, choose 2 interface ideas to evaluate. Select 2-3 representative tasks for each (they can be the same tasks for each interface). Extend your prototypes as needed so that your participants can experience what it is like to perform those tasks using your envisioned interfaces. Your test-ready prototypes might take the form of UI screen mock-ups and/or paper prototypes. Conduct Wizard-of-Oz test. Run your WoZ test with 3-5 representative participants. You may wish to make basic communication output visible to users as is appropriate for the application domain. You do not need to implement a complete communication system – a human "wizard" can watch the input from participant and respond accordingly. It could be useful to start implementing the prototype, so you have a hybrid system that's part working code and part human wizard. You can decide how many participants to observe based on how much you're learning from each trial. You can use this as an opportunity to record actual communication data, so that you can later test your prototype using realistic input performances. Deliverable:By 12:00 noon on 5/1 , add a stand-alone slide presentation describing your Wizard-of-Oz testing. Note the tasks you chose to test and why. Describe the data you collected during Wizard-of-Oz testing and discuss what you learned. How do you plan to revise your designs based on the results? Do you have a better sense of which of your prototype interfaces may prove most successful? |
| May 8 | Milestone 4: Functional Prototype I (5%) Implement an initial working prototype. Choose your most promising interface idea so far (which may involve a combination of earlier ideas!) and implementing an initial working prototype. The goal of this milestone is to have a bare bones functional system that implements the central tasks of your prototype to be able to run user tests without a "wizard". You will need to prioritize various aspects of the system. For example, you may spend more time ensuring that your mechanisms for capturing and displaying rich media work well and less time getting into a communication session or optimizing the pixel-placement of screen widgets. Again, the goal is to have a system that you can test with representative users. You are free to use any 3rd party library you find, so long as you properly cite them in your code and write-up. Also think of a user task that would be part of your user study next week that both demos the prototype and helps you plan the user study. Pilot testing in class. On Thursday, May 8, come prepared to set up and share your working prototype with fellow students and course instructors. Design the core of your user study by preparing a couple representative tasks using your application that can be accomplished in a 5 minute pilot test. Note that next week's milestone involves conducting the user study. During this week, you should be planning ahead by designing what you want to test in your user study and recruiting participants. Deliverable: By 12 noon pm on Thursday, May 8, add a page to your group website describing the feature choices you made (along with your rationale), implementation progress so far, and a prioritized list or remaining implementation and design issues. Run pilot test in class on Thursday, May 8 with teaching staff and with other classmates. |
| May 15 | Milestone 5: User Study (5%) Design user test. It's now time to share your work with users. For this milestone, you are responsible for crafting a user study plan and then conducting user research. What are the critical tasks you'd like to test? Which users will you recruit and how will you recruit them? What data do you plan to collect and how will you analyze it? Integrate the feedback you learned from pilot testing in class on Thursday. Conduct and document user study. Run study with 5-8 sessions with representative users. Add a page to your website to document your study. Craft a page with five sections:
Deliverable: You must complete the Introduction and Methods sections by 12:00 noon on MONDAY 5/12 (note, this not a class day, but we want to pace it so that you've completed this part in time to actually run the study, collect and analyze data in time for Thursday). Your results, discussion and implications are due in a 5-minute presentation in class on Thursday, 5/15. The presentation should include a quick reminder of the goal and demo of your application, but focus on what you learned from the study and design implications for the next iteration. |
| May 22 | Milestone 6: Functional Prototype II (5%) Design and Develop iteration. Based on the results of your user study, design and implement the next iteration of your application. Deliverable: By 12:00 noon on Thurs 5/22, add a page to your group website documenting your the main changes you made to the prototype and why, implementation progress, and describing any new features of your latest prototype. In class on Thurs 5/22 be prepared to demo your prototype to your classmates and instructors. Prepare a task that the teaching team can accomplish on their own within 5 minutes as a pilot user study. This is not a demo where you are walking the user through the task, but where the teaching team is actually doing the task as a user participant. Peer Grading: Also during the class period, each team is expected to do peer grading of three (3) other teams. As a team, you are to agree on a set of ratings for each of 3 other teams using the Google sheet. You should aim to complete your peer grading session within 15 minutes. You will be assigned which team to grade, and we will be looking that each team has submitted grades for their assigned teams and that each team has received three sets of grades. |
| May 29 | Milestone 7: Use Study II (8%) Conduct a comprehensive use study This use study should include a mix of performance data (How well did they accomplish the task?) and perceptual data (How did they like it? What would they improve?). You should collect data from 8-16 sessions of representative users. In addition, please design an informed consent form that is appropriate for your project and upload it onto your web site as part of the M7 deliverable by Thursday, May 29th. Remember to have participants sign one form and leave a copy with them in case they have further questions. Here is an example of a form that we talked about in lecture. Deliverable: In class presentation, 5 minutes long, showing data and analysis of what you learned from use study II. This should be similar to your Milestone 5 presentation. For the design implications, please call out any changes you plan to make to the prototype before the final presentation. |
| June 4 | Milestone 8: Final Presentation (20%) Final project presentation. This is your chance to show the world what you created this quarter. We will be inviting celebrity judges and guests from both campus and industry to see what you've accomplished. You should prepare a final presentation (not to exceed 1 minute), a 20"x30" poster describing your project and what you learned from use studies, and set up your system to provide live demos. For complete details, please see the final project presentations page. At this point, most of the work should be done, so this is about communicating what you've done to people from outside the class who haven't seen the project develop along the way. You can think of this as a pitch to upper management (or a venture capitalist) as to why they should fund this project! Presentation. Prepare your final presentation. The final presentation must be no more than 1 minute in length, and essentially demonstrates what your project does in a way that attracts people to come by your "booth" for a live demo. The format for the 1-minute should be: 15 seconds of a live 3-line scene that poses the user need or problem that your project addresses. Then a 45-second video demo of how your project addresses that need. The title slide should have the team/project name, team member names, and some visual introduction to the project. More details regarding the exact format are now available here. This presentation (in Google Slides format, with a video embedded) must be uploaded to this Google Folder by 12:00 noon on Wednesday, June 4th so that we can collate them into an integrated, timed slide deck for the presentation that evening.. Poster. The poster introduces your project, and documents insights learned from the use study. By viewing the poster, people should be able to understand what need your application addresses and what you learned from use studies of the prototype. The poster should be printed out and mounted on a stiff backing so that it can stand alone on easel next to your demo station. Live Demo. Put the last touches on your functional prototype so that it is ready for a live demo. People will be encouraged to come by and try out your live demo during the open session. Think of walking through a scenario (perhaps one of the tasks used in the use study) that would give people a feel for how the system works within just a few minutes. You will need to walk through this 5-minute demo in class on June 3 for grading. Website. Prior to the final presentation session, you should put the finishing touches on your project website. Add links to your poster, presentation materials, and final source code (a zip archive of your project code) . The URL for your page will be shared with the world, so think about how your web page design effectively presents your project work! We will be using your website to investigate any questions that arise in grading the final project, so make sure that copies of the presentation, the poster, the code, and any information explaining your project is available and easily findable through your website. Post-Course Reflection. After the poster session, we'd like each of you to reflect on your project and your experiences in the class, including your working dynamics of your P4 final project team. Please fill out the Google Form by 10am on Thursday, June 5. |
For more details about the final deliverables, please see this page that is now available here.
Final Presentation Grading Criteria
The final presentation is worth 20% of your grade, which is further broken down as:| 5% | Implementation - What is the quality of your implementation as demonstrated by the demo walkthrough in class on June 3rd? Is it appropriately polished, robust, and reliable for your chosen problem? |
| 5% | Presentation - Does your final presentation and demo clearly and effectively explain what your project is about and how it fills the users' needs? |
| 5% | <Poster - Does the poster clearly and effectively introduce the project and explain what you learned from use studies? |
| 5% | Design Solution - Does your design work for your intended users? Is this supported by user testing results? |