Assignment M1 (Summer 2017)

Due: Sunday, June 18th, 2017, by 11:59PM UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth). This assignment is based on lesson 3.3 (Needfinding), and focuses on planning your needfinding process.

Getting Started

In the M assignments, you will complete one cycle through the design life cycle with a task of your choice. This may be redesigning an existing interface, or it may be designing a new interface to address some as-yet unaddressed task. You are encouraged, but not required, to treat these assignments as the first iteration through the design life cycle on the same task you plan to address in the team project; your team project will be best positioned for success if it is informed by several smaller individual investigations of the task. We encourage you to talk with your team prior to beginning the M assignments to figure out how your individual work can best be constructed to inform the team project.

However, this is not required. You may choose a completely different task or interface to investigate for the M projects. You should choose this prior to beginning Assignment M1. The same advice applies here that applies to selecting tasks for team projects:

  • Select tasks with large audiences. You’ll need to recruit participants to complete surveys or participate in interviews, and selecting tasks with extremely niche audiences will make this difficult, unless you have access to that audience.
  • Emphasize the task. As you’ll learn in Unit 2, when designing interfaces, we are actually designing tasks. In this project, you shouldn’t redesign entire web sites or entire apps; most web sites and mobile apps support multiple tasks. Instead, focus on a specific task to redesign, like the search function for Netflix or the password-entry part of using an ATM machine.
  • Select a commonly-known task. After all, the graders and your peers need to evaluate and give feedback on your work; if they are completely unfamiliar with the task you’ve selected, they will have difficulty providing feedback.

Defining the problem space will be the first task you undertake in Assignment M1.

Assignment Instructions

Answer the following prompt in a maximum of 1200 words, with a recommended length of 1000 words. Including more than 1200 words may incur a grade penalty. Note that only the overall assignment length limit is enforced; per-section lengths are provided as recommendations, but are not enforced.

You are encouraged to complement your response with diagrams, drawings, pictures, etc.; these do not count against the word limit. If you would like to include additional information beyond the word limit, you may include it in clearly-marked appendices. These materials will not be used in grading your assignment, but they may help you get better feedback from your classmates and grader. For example, you might include copies of previous assignments, copies of your surveys, raw data, interview transcripts, raw notes, etc.: anything that does not directly address the assignment’s questions, but rather helps understand your progress as a whole.

In this assignment, you’ll compile a plan for your initial needfinding exercise for the project you’ve selected. You will not perform the needfinding exercises yet; that is what you’ll do in Assignment M2.

Abstract: ~50 words

First, include an abstract that briefly introduces your project and gives context on what task you’re addressing. You’ll include this abstract in each M assignment to give the grader and your peers context on what you’re working on. If you’d like to include more context than you can fit into 50 words, feel free to include an appendix containing an extended abstract.

Problem Space: ~100 words

Next, define the problem space. Define the problem itself and the location in which the problem takes place, including elements of the environment surrounding the problem. This is also where you’ll define the segment of the target domain for which you’re interested in developing (e.g. the turning alerts for a navigation app or the search function for a Netflix app). You’ll develop this more when you actually carry out the needfinding exercises, but you need to have some rough idea to know where to start looking.

User Types: ~100 words

Then, outline your user types. For whom are you interested in designing? Make sure to include their demographic information, their levels of expertise, and their motivations for engaging in the task. It is fine to have a broad, diverse audience rather than a narrowly targeted one, but that diversity needs to be defined explicitly.

Needfinding Plan 1: ~250 words

With that foundation, select and plan one of the needfinding methods we’ve covered:

  • Naturalistic observation: what will you observe? Where? When? What data will you gather?
  • Participant observation: what will you do? What steps will you follow? What data will you gather?
  • Surveys: what will you ask? Who will you send the survey to?
  • Interviews: what will you ask? Who will you ask?
  • Think-aloud or post-event protocols: what will participants do? What will you ask them while or after they do it?
  • Apprenticeship: who will you work with? What will you learn?
  • Analysis of existing user interfaces: what interfaces will you look at? Where will you find them?
  • Analysis of product reviews: where will you find the reviews? How will you examine them systematically?
  • Analysis of existing data logs: where will you find the data logs? How will you examine them systematically?

Lay out a clear plan for that needfinding exercise. The nature of the plan will differ based on the type of needfinding you select, as indicated by the questions in the list above. For all methods, you should answer the questions above in the body of your assignment; however, you should feel free to also include things like the full survey text or the full interview script in an appendix.

Make sure to connect the needfinding exercise to items from the data inventory, which is the second video in the Needfinding lesson. Each needfinding exercise does not need to address every item in the data inventory; however, generally every part of the needfinding exercise should address some item in the data inventory.

Last, specifically outline the potential biases you might encounter during this needfinding exercise. What are they, and what concrete steps will you take to limit their impact? You can find a list of some common biases in the fifth video in the Needfinding lesson. You might also find some interesting biases to address in Wikipedia’s long list of biases.

Needfinding Plan 2: ~250 words

Repeat the steps for Needfinding Plan 1, selecting a different needfinding approach. Make sure to lay out a plan for the needfinding approach, connect the approach to the items in the data inventory, and address the biases that may come up when using that approach.

Needfinding Plan 3: ~250 words

Repeat the steps for Needfinding Plan 1 and Needfinding Plan 2, selecting a third different needfinding approach. Make sure to lay out a plan for the needfinding approach, connect the approach to the items in the data inventory, and address the biases that may come up when using that approach.

Submission Instructions

Assignments should be submitted to the corresponding assignment on T-Square in accordance with the Assignment Submission Instructions. Most importantly, you should submit a single PDF for each assignment. This PDF will be ported over to Peer Feedback for peer review by your classmates. If your assignment involves things (like videos, working software prototypes, etc.) that cannot be provided in PDF, you should provide them separately (either through the class Resources folder or your own upload destination) and submit a PDF that describes how to access the assignment.

This is an individual assignment. Every student should submit an assignment individually.

Late work is not accepted without advanced agreement except in cases of medical or family emergencies. In the case of an emergency, please contact the Dean of Students.

Grading Information

As with all assignments and projects in this class, this assignment will be graded on a traditional A-F scale based on the extent to which your assignment meets expectations. Due to T-Square restrictions, your grade will be provided on a 5-point scale: a ‘5’ is an A, a ‘4’ is a B, a ‘3’ is a C, a ‘2’ is a D, a ‘1’ is an F, and a ‘0’ is a failure-to-submit.

Peer Review

After submission, your assignment will be ported to Peer Feedback for review by your classmates. Grading is not the primary function of this peer review process; the primary function is simply to give you the opportunity to read and comment on your classmates’ ideas, and receive additional feedback on your own. All grades will come from the graders alone.

You will typically be assigned three classmates to review. You receive 1.5 participation points for completing a peer review by the end of the day Thursday; 1.0 for completing a peer review by the end of the day Sunday; and 0.5 for completing it after Sunday but before the end of the semester. For more details, see the participation policy.