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In addition to the individual assignments, activities, and exams,
we will have a semester-long team project with multiple phases
and sub-phases. This will be a team project, where teams should
consist of four students (some teams of three might be approved
based on enrollment, but the default expectation is four).
Each team will be assigned a member of the course instructional team
(the instructor and the teaching assistants) as a "senior manager" who
will interact with the team throughout the semester in various ways.
In addition to assessment and grading
of each phase and sub-phase by members of the instructional team,
there will be peer assessment submitted for some of the four
phases of the project.
In these situations,
you will each be asked to describe what each of your teammates did
on the phase as part of this assessment.
All students in a team are expected to participate in each phase
and understand their own value,
but are also expected to understand the contributions of their fellow
team members.
One "goal" of the peer assessment is to help all members of the team
think about the contribution they are making and hopefully decrease
the likelyhood that someone will "coast"
(see social loafing).
These assessments will be used as part of the grading criteria, but
the hope is that if there is a team with an issue, that thinking about
these assessments will motivate the team to come see me to help them
work things out and have a better team experience.
It is likely that for certain aspects there will be "lead"
students working on different deliverables at times, but all
students on the team should be discussing and reviewing each
other's work as well and all voices should be heard during
team meetings.
You will be able to use our class'
Slack team page for team
coordination, and will be required to use it for interacting
with the instructor and your TA.
Note that if this were being done "for real" the best team would have
people from diverse backgrounds, which would 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.
I would encourage you to think about this as we form groups.
A more detailed description will be posted for each phase, but
it will be useful to present an overview here to get us started.
Phase 1 will have three related sub-phases.
In Phase 1.1 you will form your teams around a project option
and submit an initial "pitch-back" or "pitch"
where each team will describe (in two pages or less) their project
as they see it, including its overall audience and overall goals,
all presented in the team's own words.
For the goals, you should be able to describe at least three primary
goals, and potentially more (and/or some secondary goals).
This sub-phase's anticipated due date will be by 11:59pm on
September 13th
You will then begin work (right away) on
Phase 1.2 where you continue to think about your project option,
potentially updating the pitch, but most importantly writing up
2 to 3 user personas and
4 to 6 full task scenarios that you envision represent some of
the situations in which people will use your system.
You will also arrange to meet with your "senior manager" to
discuss the current direction you have described and to ask
any questions you might have as a team.
In doing this phase, you will be expected to communicate with some
example potential users and/or stakeholders of your system.
This sub-phase's anticipated due date will be by 11:59pm on
September 20th
With this more complete view of your project, each team will work
to create a set of paper prototypes reflecting several rapid iterations
on their ideas, the team's brainstorming on how to support the users,
as well as ideas from some of the example potential users you show
these prototypes.
Teams may choose to request a meeting with their "senior manager"
during this process as well.
This sub-phase's anticipated due date will be by 11:59pm on
October 4th
Phase 2 will have two related sub-phases.
Phase 2 will be the medium-fidelity prototype implementation,
and should be considered a more coding-centric phase in terms
of time and effort, but still needs to be very user and task centric.
The end result will be an interactive application that allows
you to demonstrate the overall look and layout of your system
as well as the successful completion of several important
interactive tasks.
If there are certain features that would require real-time decisions
based on certain contextual information, you can (and should)
still demonstrate these in your prototype via hard-coded sequences
based on a specific scenario. This will allow us to experience the
interaction and flow, and therefore be able to better assess that
feature.
For Phase 2.1 you will need to provide a "game plan" detailing
what vertical and horizontal prototype elements you will complete
by the end of Phase 2 as well as your development platform.
As you work on this, you might find your team updating the ideas
in the paper prototypes. This is perfectly fine.
Your team might identify project elements for which you plan to
have hard-coded data examples, or very simple backends (like a
text file) even though a real system might have something more
scalable (like a DBMS). This is also likely to be acceptable
since the goals for this phase are focused on the user interface
and their tasks rather than addressing issues of backend
scalability (which is a value software engineering issue of course).
This sub-phase's anticipated due date will be by 11:59pm on
October 11th
and we encourage you to start working on it right after Phase 1.3
is turned in if not before.
Phase 2.2 is best described as the "now go build" part of the
overall project. Your team will implement significant horizontal and
vertical elements of your project in an interactive prototype so that
potential users and stakeholders will be able to interact with it and
assess how the full version will address their needs and impact their lives.
Realistic data and scenarios are an important foundation for a good prototype.
Your team will also submit a written report with this prototype.
This report will contain things such as any re-design rationale that
is needed, screenshots showing the "look" of certain aspects of your
project, as well as a list of 5 to 10 solid tasks that can be
accomplished with your prototype (we will use this list as we perform
our grading assessment and it will also be used in Phase 3).
The medium-fidelity prototype and write-up anticipated due date
will be by 11:59pm on
November 12th
However, there will also be at least one, if not two, times during this
phase where each team will be required to meet with their TA to present
a progress report and demo of what has been built up to that point.
Phase 3 will have two parallel sub-phases.
Parallel sub-phase 3.1
will be a team presentation video submission about their own prototype
due by 11:59pm on
November 19th
Parallel sub-phase 3.2
will be a user study and heuristic evaluation of another team's
Phase 2.2 prototype. We anticipate this will be due by 11:59pm on
December 3rd
Phase 4 will have one internal phase.
You can consider this final phase a set of
"biggest bang for the buck" updates to your prototype
and the formulation of a long-term plan for full development.
Each team will have gotten much feedback (from both the 434
instructional team as well as your peers) and the goal here
is to demonstrate some "fast but meaningful" changes to your prototype
through screenshots,
showing that you understood the feedback you have received.
Similarly, based on what you have learned from others and from
class material, you will write up a theoretical plan for the next
3, 6, 12, or 18 months for how you would continue development
towards a real product.
Your updated prototype screenshots and write-up will likely be due by 11am on
December 13th
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