CMSC 434 - Spring 2006
Prof Guimbretiere

Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction

Projects topics

Each group might pick one of the following topic described bellow for its class projects (there will be around 10 teams in the class, and at most 2 teams will be allowed to select the same project option). You may choose from one of these project:

• A new user interface for car navigation system;

• Flight reservation system;

• New interface for the iPod shuttle;

• An eBook reader targeted for the elderly;

• A new user interface for high end copy machines;

• MP3 player;

• A kiosk to help people pick a movie at Blockbuster;

• Your own project

Restrictions

We are not designing web pages in this course. For this reason, the default rule for your project is that your UI may not be browser-based. If after you have completed project 2, you feel that a browser is the best client, you can write a formal request to use a browser as your client for project 3, but you must be prepared for this request to be denied, so you should do your entire project 1 assuming that you will not be using a browser.

Teams

You will work with 2-3 others from this course. The idea of working with others is to get alternate design ideas, alternate ways of looking at things, and more breadth at eliciting and interpreting evaluations. It is your responsibility to find team members that you can work with.

Note that if this were being done "for real", the best team would have people from diverse backgrounds, which will give the team different perspectives on the problem. For example, a real team could comprise a project manager, a marketing person, a programmer, a representative end user, and/or a help desk person who regularly deals with end users.  To this end, I encourage you to build teams with people with different strengths.  Picking a team with the 4 best programmers will not generate the best results.

Hardware rules

To simplify grading and testing, the following that hardware rules will apply to all 434 projects:

Prototyping phase (Step #2)
You should not consider issues such as programming languages. You should instead focus on issues such as tasks, appearance and functionality.

Implementation phase (Step #3)
You will choose the specifics of how to implement your project within certain limits. Since you will need to demonstrate your project in class as well as give it to another team to evaluate, all projects must be able to run under Windows XP. If you would like to simulate communication over a network by simply having both the client and server running on the same machine and communicating via sockets (for example) you may do so.
Notice that in all cases, you may simulate a piece of hardware that we do not have access to during the semester. For example, if you wanted to use biometrics, you could say "there would be a thumbprint recognition device here" and simulate it by having an image that represented it and a pop-up menu of names that comes up if you click on that image so you can make the selection which would really be done by the biometric device in practice.