Part 1 Description

Part 1 - Requirements Gathering: People, Places, and Activities (20%)

Understanding the Design Space: Designer as researcher or detective (Rubric)

DUE: Sunday 2/25 by 11:59 pm on Canvas and   Team Page

The goal is to understand the design space you are addressing, its set of pertinent stakeholders, the tasks they perform, where they perform these tasks and the and the constraints that are involved. You must identify the important characteristics that will influence your subsequent design (i.e., Part 2). In other words, the CURRENT state of the People, Places and Activities.

In class we will discuss primary and secondary data collection approaches. Your report and deliverable for this part should examine the application domain. Who are the potential users? What tasks do they seek to perform? Where would the user use the artifact? Basically, you are establishing a set of constraints for your subsequent design. What criteria should be used to judge if your design is a success or not? You are establishing guidelines to know if the final design is useful and usable.

In this assignment you are NOT proposing solutions/designs etc. You are presenting all of the relevant information that will allow you to explore the design space in Part 2.

More specifically, you should apply what you learn from lectures and studios to your problem space and communicate them through your report. Your report should encompass most, if not all, of these components:

1.    An update of the design context (Part 0).

2.    Methodology: A description and justification of how the source material was created and the data were gathered.

3.    User Characteristics: A description of the important characteristics of the users of the system. This should include a variety of techniques presented in lecture.

4.    Task Analyses: A written description of the major tasks of current UIs. 

5.    Current UI Critique: evaluate an existing system/interface. Big picture strengths and weaknesses of the current design. Note: if there isn't a comparable system, you can consider one that addresses the task or one that is close conceptually. Application of functional non-functional characteristics.

6.    Usability Goals: A table with concrete, specific, measurable usability goals. 

7. Implications: A discussion of the implications of what you learned above. Don't just describe the target users, tasks, environment, etc. Tell us how these attributes should/will influence your design. Are there any implications to be made from the user profiles and other data you gathered? We will be very careful to look for this information in your report. This is the one place in the report where you can start to think about future design.

8.Limitations: What are the limitations of the data you gathered? Is there adequate synthesis of data analyzed that leads toward advice for any solutions to build in Part 2 of this project? This will be evidence by making references to the class activities (participation, homework, etc).

9. Reflections: Think about Part 1, what was hard about this phase of the project? What was easy? What would you do differently if you were to start over? What would you do next if you had more time? Think about this as a way to provide context to someone who is reading the report or who may need to pick up where you left off. 


See the Rubric for evaluation details.

A successful project report is one that