CMSC 498D - Spring 07
Prof Guimbretière

Introduction to Rapid Prototyping Techniques

Take One (Due 04/19/07)

The goal of the third part of your project assignment is to build your project first functional prototype. You will be asked to a write 3-4 pages (in 2 columns format) report describing your implementation as well as the result of your preliminary evaluation. Your report should conclude with a discussion on how you are planning to improve your design in light of what you learned during your preliminary evaluation.

What to do

Build the first prototype for your project

This is the main part of this assignment. With the results of the evaluation of your proposed design, you are now ready to build the first prototype for your project.  The following aspects are of particular importance:

• Scope. You will have 3 weeks to build and test your prototype. It is extremely important that you do not attempt to build too complicated a prototype. Instead you should identify the key features that need to be implemented and focus on these features, leaving aside the bells and whistles for now.

• Reliability. You will use your prototype for a preliminary run of evaluation, so it is important that your system be stable enough for such an evaluation. For example if you think that your evaluation will take 30 min, your prototype has to be able to perform as expected for such amount of time.

• Evaluation. It is important to think about the evaluation early on, so that you can select the most important features to implement (see above). Also remember that it might be simple to test several key aspect of your design separately than trying to test them all at once... Please be sure that you testing reflect realistic usage condition so that your results are externally valid.

Once you are satisfied with your design,  you should evaluate it by running a small pilot experiments. The goal of these tests is to better understand how people will react to your design. You should evaluate your design first among the members of your group (to debug your design) then by asking another group in the class to play the role of your target population, then if possible with member of your target population. As we have seen in class (see "Observing The User Experience" by Mike Kuniavsky for details), during such tests it is very important to avoid influencing users. In particular you should no "push" participant through the evaluation, but instead observe what they are doing and, in the event they get stuck, identify the problem they are facing. If something is not working as expected, remember to encourage participants by pointing out that this is not their fault, but it just means that the design that need to be improved. A couple more points:

• It is important to take notes during these pilots so that you will not forget details. It might be useful to videotape the interactions if the participant is OK with it;

• It is better to run several smaller experiments as you go, than a big experiment at the very end so that you have time to correct the problems as they are discovered;

For this part, you are asked to run a minimum of 3 pilots outside your group, 2 of whom being with participant from your target population.

Deliverables

Your deliverables will have three parts:

• A description of your "Take One" design, including annotated pictures and diagrams. The description should be such that another student in the class should be able to reproduce your design. You should be careful to justify your design decisions;

• A description of your evaluation method (where it took place, what the setting was , what the task(s) to be performed were, how the participants were selected) and the results of the evaluation. You should be careful to justify your evaluation design decisions;

• A discussion of problems you observed during you pilot studies and how you will address them in the final version of your design. Again be careful to justify your design decisions.

Presentation

Two to three group will be asked to present their work in class on the due date. Presentation should be 15 minutes long and will be followed by 10 minutes of questions/answer. It should include:

• A brief introduction of the topic,

• A description of your design and your rational for it,

• A presentation of the preliminary findings (including a description of your evaluation method),

• A description of how you are planning to update your design;

While the presentation should focus on the substance rather than the form, a reasonable presentation style is expected.