| CPSC 481 Foundations of HCI James Tam, Instructor |
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In the three course assignments, you will practise and apply particular methodologies you have learnt in class. You will pursue a controlled experiment and quantitative evaluation in Assignment 1, a usability study and qualitative evaluation in Assignment 2, and a major interface design and implementation in the Project. The assignments and project are 50% of your total grade.
This assignment is a hands-on exercise on quantitative evalution. Its immediate purpose is to give you experience conducting a controlled experiment, performing a simple statistical analysis, interpretting the results, and considering its implications to design decisions. Its other purpose is to provide you with enough knowledge of the experimental process to help you understand and appreciate the HCI literature that uses this methodology. The assignment, which changes slightly every year, compares people's mouse-typing abilities on different keyboard layouts. Mouse typing is simply the speed at which someone types, using a mouse, on a soft keyboard presented on the computer screen. Some of the keyboard layouts considered over the years are:
You will work in groups of three, and each group uses its members as subjects. Your group will submit the data collected to the teaching assistant, who will compile the data from all group and hand it back to the class. Your group will then use an unpaired T-Test to check for differences between the typing speeds.
Your group will deliver a substantial technical report that presents the experiment, collects the results, and discusses its implications. Your report must follow the format defined in the above-mentioned handout How to Structure Reports on Experiments in HCI.
The paper Text entry using soft keyboards describes a real study of soft keyboard use, and a model that predicts human performance on them.
This assignment is a hands-on exercise on qualitative evalution. Its immediate purpose is to give you experience conducting a usability study. Methods used in this study include conceptual model discovery, strict observation, think-aloud, constructive interaction, questionnaires, and interviews. Because of the economy of these methods, you are expected to be able to apply them in your actual work practices.
Your group will pretend it is working for a company that is developing the system. You will use each other as subjects, applying the various methodologies. The system examined by the class changes every year. Systems investigated have include:
Your group will deliver a substantial technical report written to the (imaginary) vice-president of the company that commissioned the study. It must include your observations, the findings, the major problems detected, and some design recommendations. Your report will briefly contrast the methods used, recommending which ones should be adapted in future study.
This term project is a major portion of the course. Its main purpose is to give you hands-on experience applying some of the design concepts you have learnt in class. As part of this project, you will learn how to storyboard, learn how to program with a graphical user interface toolkit, and how to write a minimalist user manual.
The project is executed in two parts: design and implementation. You will be working in groups of three. Your group will select a simple but interesting interactive application. You may come up with the application from scratch, or you may decide to remodel an existing application to make it more effective. Design evolution includes paper prototypes, a horizontal prototype, and a moderately robust implementation using the Tcl/Tk interface toolkit.
Deliverables are incremental. Over a period of time, you will hand in an initial paper prototype and design rationale (which is presented in lab time), and screen snapshots of a horizontal prototype and the re-design rationale (also presented in lab time). The final deliverables are the full working system (graded using heuristic evaluation techniques by the course instructor), a minimalist manual, and a short design critique of the final system. For example, one group created a a walk up and use Dinosaur information system (see two snapshots of it: screen one and screen two; and another group created a Home Finder system that allows people to search for homes to buy in the city of Calgary.
