Evaluate the quality of your various designs to see how they will work for users.

Get your feature list that you created in a previous assignment. Update this list of features to reflect your current thinking about the problem you are solving (this may have changed). For each feature prepare a card (3x5) with a user task that will exercise that feature. Sort these feature cards in highest to lowest priority order.

Using your PowerPoint UI designs from a previous assignment generate a set of slides that will show every state of your user interface. If there is a menu, then you need a slide for every destination of that menu. There may be a lot of slides and you will need to work out all of the issues.

Label all of your slides so that you can refer to them. For each slide, prepare an annotated version that identifies the destination slide for that action.

Print all of your slides.

As a group, take every card from your feature tasks and talk through what should happen in your UI design to accomplish that task. Take for example the task "Find a class to register for". Your analysis might yield:

Click on the "Find Class" button (opens the find class page)

Type in the class number in the class number box

Click search (goes to search results)

Click on the "Register for class" button

What you are looking for is important features that are too complicated to reach. Your goal here is to find ways to simplify the important things.

Prepare a report with a one-page summary of your findings as well as the full analysis of your UI. Write a second section about what needs to change in your design to simplify getting important tasks done.

Find users from your target user group. Perform PAPER user studies as described below. Every person should serve as lead or scribe on at least one study.

Paper user study

There is a lead and a scribe. The lead works with the user conducting the study. The scribe writes down every problem or issue along with the ID of the slide and task where the issue appeared.

Your role is to listen to the user, not to correct them or to guide them to the right answer. If they can't readily work that out on their own, then you have a UI design problem. That is what you want to know.

For each user (at least 5 different users)

Briefly explain the system you are trying to develop and the nature of the study you are performing.

Tell them that they will be shown slides of the user interface be given tasks. They are to point at the slide where they would interact and then say what they would do.

For each feature task card (use the 10 most important ones)

Show the user the starting slide's printout

Show the user the feature task card and let them read it.

As the user to points to parts of the slide, change the slide to the appropriate new slide for the next state of the user interface.

Come to class prepared to present your findings.

One member of your group should submit your study writeups to LearningSuite.

Clear set of tasks to ask of the users (representative of the most important issues that you need to know)

Clear description of the problems, successes that each user had. Can I understand the user's key experiences (not your interpretation of those experiences) from reading your report.

Solid conclusions/changes. How did the user experience change your design?