Even for a well-understood, well-motivated problem, choosing a design to invest time into is a difficult and laborious process. This group assignment, spanning multiple weeks of the course, tackles the problem of selecting the right design through contextual inquiry, task development, generating multiple potential designs, and finally selecting a design to pursue.
In this assignment, you will brainstorm a large set of possible tasks and design ideas for your project. You will then use contextual inquiry to learn more about your problem and the current practices of people who might use your design. You will draw upon the ideas developed in your brainstorming and the observations made in your contextual inquiry to help develop a set of potential tasks your design might support. You will next sketch how a set of initial designs might support those tasks. You will choose a design to pursue in the remainder of the course and storyboard the details of your design in the context of important tasks. Finally, you will present your design process in a report and presentation.
More specifically, you will do the following:
All/most deliverables should be posted to a single website hosted on Github, so that the work can be easily cloned to other machines.
In one paragraph, describe the people who might use your design and other stakeholders for your design. Describe the particular contextual inquiry participants you plan to pursue, including some details of their background and the environment where you will observe their current practices. Give enough details to convince me that you can actually find and interview your target participants in the next week.
For example, your target participants should not be “doctors” but instead a specific group of doctors (e.g., Family Practitioners in the SWVMC Pownal Clinic). If gaining access to the target participants is non-trivial (e.g., as with busy doctors), describe the steps you have already taken to gain access and your plans to recover if you are unable to gain access. Indicate when you will be conducting your three inquiries, being as specific as possible. (Note: at least one of your three participants must not be a Williams student, and the person performing the inquiry interview should not have previously met the participant they are interviewing).
In another paragraph, describe how you will interact with your participants and your role as the “apprentice”.
Please be as specific as possible, providing potential examples of your observation focus or inquiry questions.
Examples from prior offerings include:
No more than one page of text (~500 words). Post your team's Contextual Inquiry Plan to a page on your Project Website.
In class, be prepared to discuss the plan with other teams and the course staff.
Be sure to take notes during critique. I will provide a worksheet you can use:
Contextual Inquiry Plan - Critique Worksheet
After class, submit images of your notes in PDF format. Submit TBD.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 3 points:
Complete at least one contextual inquiry prior to this check-in. You hopefully learned something about the needs of people who might use your design, but also about how to conduct a contextual inquiry.
Describe your first inquiry:
Discuss what remains to be pursued after your first inquiry. I fully expect changes will be necessary, as inquiries can be difficult to get right and often important topics are left unresolved.
REMEMBER: All names of inquiry participants should be replaced with pseudonyms in all documents you submit to me! It is important to protect the identity of your participants even in the case that your study seems harmless.
Examples from prior offerings include:
No more than one page of text (~500 words). Post your team's Contextual Inquiry Check-in to a page on your Project Website. One team member should post a link to the project on the appropriate Slack channel.
In class, be prepared to discuss your contextual inquiry.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 6 points:
Themes
Complete all three of your contextual inquiries (or design research methods). Discuss your process and what you learned:
Across the three inquiries, you should expect some emergence of common themes, problems, and practices that arise while completing an affinity diagram.
If you are having trouble identifying high level themes and problems from your inquiries, it may be a sign that you need to run an additional inquiry. You are required to run three inquiries, but you are not limited to only running three. These inquiries are critical for setting the foundation of your project, so ensure that you have strong findings from your inquiries before moving forward!
Task Analysis Questions
Provide brief answers to the following questions. These should help you begin to identify tasks essential to your design.
Examples from prior offerings include:
No more than four pages of text (4*500 words):
Submit as a page on your Team Project Website, and post a link on the appropriate Slack channel.
In class, be prepared to discuss your contextual inquiry.
Be sure to take notes during critique. I will provide a worksheet you can use:
Contextual Inquiry Review - Critique Worksheet
After class, submit images of your notes in PDF format. Submit TBD.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 6 points:
Building on what you learned in your contextual inquiry, design six tasks that you believe are integral to your overall design goal:
Each task should be described in text. Tasks say what is accomplished, leaving open how to accomplish it. So be sure that your task conveys a problem and what is accomplished, rather than a step-by-step walk-through of scenario with a particular design.
Examples from prior offerings include:
No more than two pages of text (2*500 words) as a page on your Project Website, plus Slack link:
In class, be prepared to discuss your tasks.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 6 points:
You have identified and described six important tasks for your design problem. You will now brainstorm and sketch three very different initial designs for your interface:
The purpose of these sketches is to explore the design space before you lock yourself into a single design. They must demonstrate significant consideration of substantially different approaches to your problem.
Note: Your designs may span different technologies, or all be within the same technology (or a mix). Think of different ways to organize and prioritize the varying tasks you're supporting. 'Mobile App Design' is not a name for a design - what's unique about this particular app design?
You may also consider reserving one of your designs to be a creative 'moonshot'. Have fun with the ideas!
Examples from prior offerings include:
No more than four pages of text (4*500 words, 2*500 of which are for your six task descriptions) on your Project Website:
Images do not count against your word limit, and are therefore effectively free. You should embed images throughout your webpage, keeping them near the text that references them. The limit applies to the approximate amount of text you would have if all images were removed.
In class, be prepared to discuss your design sketches with other teams and the course staff.
Be sure to take notes during critique. I will provide a worksheet you can use:
Design Check-in - Critique Worksheet
After class, submit images of your notes in PDF format. Submit TBD.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 6 points:
From your design sketches, select one design that you will refine in the remainder of this course. Then select two tasks that will be the focus of your design refinement. The selected tasks need to be representative of the experience of using your design.
Prepare one paragraph describing why you selected the design you did. Draw upon feedback from critiques and data from your contextual inquiry.
Convey a strong understanding of which design you chose, which tasks you chose, and why you chose them.
Then create a storyboard of each task for your selected design. These should be done on paper, then scanned (i.e., do not create or recreate them in a drawing package). They should clearly indicate the functionality of the design and what the interface will be like, conveying the major aspects of the design in enough detail that a person not in your group can understand how the design supports each task. As needed, add descriptions that explicitly reference the storyboard, add more sketches, or annotate them in multiple colors.
Examples from prior offerings include:
No more than one page of text (~500 words) on your Project Website:
Images do not count against your word limit, and are therefore effectively free. You should embed images throughout your webpage, keeping them near the text that references them. The limit applies to the approximate amount of text you would have if all images were removed.
In class, be prepared to discuss your choices and storyboards.
This milestone will be graded on a scale of 6 points:
Prepare a single-page "pitch webpage" documenting your process of getting the right design. This single page should motivate your final design focus in an evidence-based manner. Briefly summarize each of the previous steps of this project as motivation, and provide links to the in-depth deliverables you turned in. Previous deliverables can be placed into an 'Appendix' (as a tab on the main page, perhaps?), and referred to for more in-depth insight.
Your UX Research report should follow the outline below, and will be graded using the guidelines that follow. Reading about some tips for providing a research pitch might be informative: What are the elements of an effective elevator pitch? and How do I improve my storytelling? Be concise!
If you completed all of your deliverables above, you will have the appendices for this report nearly completed. But it is critical that you revise and update that content (especially with respect to feedback received previously) as well as provide a cohesive story for your single-page report. You have received extensive feedback throughout your design process, and evaluation of your report will include how you have addressed and incorporated that feedback to improve relative to your prior milestones.
Envision this report as a UX Research Project Portfolio webpage. Something like this UX Design Project Portfolio webpage that documents the process in more depth, with links to further reading into the details, but for your UX Research process and findings.
Ensure your report is appropriately clear and easy to read. This includes:
Be sure your presentation looks good:
Examples from prior offerings include:
Note that these samples are from different courses, so details of assignments may not be the same (prior to Fall 2018, they're significantly different). Also note these samples are intended to illustrate a variety of approaches, none of which is intended to be ideal or exemplary. Be sure to understand and carefully consider project requirements and feedback from the instructor in the context of your own work.
No more than three pages of text (3*500 words) on your course website, following the above outline.
Images do not count against your page limit, and are therefore effectively free. You should embed images throughout your webpages, keeping them near the text that references them. The limit applies to the approximate amount of text you would have if all images were removed.
Submit as a link to your project website, via Slack.
Names of participants should be replaced with pseudonyms in all documents. It is important to protect participant anonymity, even in the case that reporting seems harmless.
This report will be graded on a scale of 25 points:
Prepare a presentation of your process in getting the right design. It should encompass all of your work in UX Research: Looking to Understand.
A suggested organization of this presentation is:
I strongly recommend rehearsing your presentation beforehand. For example, arrange to practice together with another group or two, giving each other feedback on your presentations.
Note that I have not provided recommendations for the number of slides in each section of this presentation. You can deliver your presentation using as many or as few slides as you want, as long as you successfully address the above points and the presentation falls within the time restriction.
Examples from prior offerings include:
Note that these are from different courses, and so these student reports may not map to our current project! Also note these samples are intended to illustrate a variety of approaches, none of which is intended to be ideal or exemplary. Be sure to understand and carefully consider project requirements and feedback from the instructor in the context of your own work.
Your presentation must be in PDF format.
To minimize switching time, we will have all presentations on a single laptop running macOS. You should optimize your presentation for portability (e.g., ensure any necessary fonts are embedded). If I detect any obvious formatting issues on the presentation machine, I may fix them or contact you to fix them. But you are ultimately responsible for your presentation.
Submit via a link to your course website on Slack.
Names of participants should be replaced with pseudonyms in all documents. It is important to protect participant anonymity, even in the case that reporting seems harmless.
I will have a feedback form I keep during your presentation: Rubric-LookingToUnderstand-Presentation
The content of this presentation will be graded on a per-team basis on a scale of 10 points:
The delivery of this presentation will be graded individually on a scale of 4 points: