Roland Hübscher

IDCC375
User Interface Design

Small Group Project for IDCC375

Groups

These groups are meant to have a good combination of skills and diverse backgrounds. The idea is that you learn from each other. Do not just use a divide-and-conquer approach and not talk to each other otherwise. At the end of the project, you both need to understand why and how you did it equally well.

Topic

How can you tell time on Bentley Campus? People use their watch or phone. The clock tower of the library does tell time but it's not teribly useful. Design a new, innovative solution so that people can use it to tell ``time.'' We'll talk more about the problem in class, including wy I put time in double quotation marks.

Normally, approaching this problem would require a lengthy, iterative design process with several phases, and we'll do exactly this in the larger group project. For this warm-up project, we'll keep it short. Each group will have to hand in the following:

  • Your final design marked as such and all intermediate sketches, doodles, notes, etc. that led to the final design. Order them according to creation date. Your sketches, etc. need to be hand drawn, not produced with some fancy software tool. The final design must be neat and clear. The others, well, they don't have to. But I want to see them anyway because the process matters!

  • Write a report (this part with some software tool, please) including the following parts. Use the same order and same headings, please.

    Need
    Describe the need for your product and your target group. Make the case that there is a market for your product.

    Analysis
    Analyze the functionality (what tasks does your solution support), the users (your target population) and context in which they are going to use it. Be detailed but avoid being unnecessarily verbose. Focus on those characteristics that are relevant for your design problem.

    Criteria
    Spell out clearly and explicitly what criteria you are using to evaluate your intermediate and final designs. Saying "it must be easy to use" is useless. Be more specific. If the criteria are not measurable, they are useless. That is, you can't just say over and over in a loud voice "mine's better."

    Design alternatives
    Briefly describe your designs (you had some alternatives in mind) and how they stack up given your criteria.

    Final design
    Evaluate your final design. What has worked out well? Where are still some problems?

    Reflection
    Reflect on your design process. Where did you run into problems? What could be done better? How would you do it next time? What else should you have known before you started this project?