Term Project
Overview
The term project is an essential part of this course and it gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the key concepts and techniques in user interaction design. It also allows you to delve deeper into a specific area of user interaction design.
The project may be completed individually or in a small group of no more than 3 students. The amount of work expected increases commensurate with the size of the group.
The project may be completed individually or in a small group of no more than 3 students. The amount of work expected increases commensurate with the size of the group.
Project Proposal
You must provide a 1-2 page proposal as a blog entry of your project that addresses the following points:
- Overall goal of the project
- Project team members
- Your final deliverable
- How you will conduct your interaction design, experiment, or study
- How you will evaluate your interaction, experiment, or study
- What the project will allow you to learn
Flash Presentations
You will need to give a 30 second overview (flash talk or elevator pitch) of your project that states what you plan to do, why it’s cool, why it’s worthy of a term project, and what you will learn.
Project Ideas
You may propose any user interaction design related project. Here are some suggestions – you may expand on them, change them, and refine them.
- Perform an input device evaluation and/or comparison with MTE
- Create a meeting agenda and time management clock that displays the agenda and how much time is left for each agenda item; focus is on building an easy-to-use and intuitive interface; clearly explain your metaphor and focus on how you plan to design and evaluate the user interface through usability studies, mockups, and/or GOMS
- Conduct a usability field study of an everyday computer-based device such as a car radio, music device, etc.
- Evaluate and compare the usability of Google TV vs. Apple TV vs. other net TV products
- Evaluate different touch technologies, specifically comparing capacitive, resistive, and others
- Build an Android or iPhone application to keep track of your car in a parking lot
- Evaluate web or device designs across different populations, such as younger, elderly, or impaired user communities
- Use barcodes to interact with computers. For example, having an elderly person who doesn’t know how to use computers scan a bar code or use an RFID card to invoke a command, such as composing an e-mail: a barcode to start the e-mail, use the keyboard to type, and then another to send it. Perhaps having a list of barcodes for different recipients.
- Create a voice interface for an application
- Evaluate and critique the usability of different travel web sites; evaluate their usability across different user populations; create a list of best practices for designing travel sites for specific user populations, such as elderly users
- Evaluate usability of applications is non-standard environment, such as while walking, low-light conditions, etc.
- Investigate the use of color in web design and application design
- Write a research paper that includes an evaluation or experiment
- Create a list of best practices and use them to evaluate a device or applications
- Develop an online tutorial for developing usable web sites
- Evaluate the usability of new motion input devices, such as Wii or Kinetic
- Evaluate the usability of information search display. For example, compare the Google Wonderwheel with standard search lists. Do people use the, understand them? What about the metaphor used in both cases? Are they intuitive?
- Comparing different cell phone designs.
- Evaluate and compare the usability of texting on touch vs. keyboard based mobile phones
- Evaluate the usability of self-service checkout systems such as those used at grocery stores, home centers, etc.
- Build a novel or port an existing application to a mobile device. Particular attention must be paid to the user interaction design process (mockups, evaluations, etc.) rather than building a full-featured app.
- Create an interactive kiosk for information lookup, such as faculty directory, FAQ for lab, store directions, etc.
Project Presentations
At the end of the semester you are required to give a 10-15 minute presentation of your work. The presentation should be as interactive as possible and must include a demo of you work.