FJK Home CPE/CSC 484 Syllabus Schedule Lecture Notes Assignments Project
CPE/CSC 484 User-Centered Interface Design and Development Winter 2009
Status Draft
Points 10
DeadlineThursday, March 5, 2009

CPE/CSC 484 W09 Assignment 4: Usability Evaluation

Assignment

This assignment consists of two parts, described in more detail later in this document.

Part 1: Development of the Evaluation Materials

This task is to be performed in a team of about 3-5 people, preferably the same as previous assignments.

Part 2: Individual Evaluations

Individually, you will use the developed materials and perform an evaluation of a system.

Goals and Objectives

Description

Your task in this assignment is to perform a usability evaluation of an existing system. Ideally, this system should be related to the topics of the other assignments and the final team project (it could be a similar commercial product, for example). Due to time and resource constraints, your evaluation will most likely be of the "quick and dirty" type, trying to identify the most problematic issues with low overhead.

Your team may also do a usability evaluation for the final project of one of the other teams. One of the practical difficulties in this case is of course the time dependency: There is a good chance that the other team will not yet have a final product by the time you're ready to do the evaluation. However, you can develop the evaluation materials early, and then do an evaluation of a version of the product that is as close to completion as practical.

Team Tasks

In Part 1, your team needs to decide upon a system, identify the main tasks of interest, and then develop the material to be used in the actual usability evaluation. Use the following points as guidelines when writing the deliverable for Part 1:

Individual Tasks

In Part 2, each member of the team does a separate usability evaluation by performing the tasks identified according to the material developed in Part 1. Each individual must also formulate a set of recommendations aimed at improving the user interaction and interface of the evaluated system.

Background Material

There is an abundance of material available on this topic; a list of references is given below. You can also refer to the material used by other students and teams in previous quarters, such as Hoang Bao's tablet PC questionnaire, the Internet2 high-bandwidth file transfer done by Gigi Choy and Rachelle Hom, or Melissa Toy's usability evaluation for the Amgen Web site from Winter 2005. The material can be found on the 484 Blackboard discussion forums under the W06 and W05 quarters.

Submission and Deadline

For Part 1, submit electronic versions of the documents you produced to the Blackboard Wiki. Create an overview page for your team's evaluation materials, and add a link to the table with the teams and projects on the Wiki. Your entry page should have a meaningful title ("Team 4 Evaluation" is not sufficient), a brief description of the topic and your approach, and a list of team members. You can post the materials as one large document or as several separate documents; use the guidelines above for the overall structure. If the structure for your materials is different, it might be useful to explain the structure you're using.

Submit the individual evaluations as additional documents to the entry page. This way, the individual materials are grouped together with the respective team materials. You can submit supporting documents such as questionnaires as hardcopies, but your main evaluation document should be submitted on Blackboard.

The deadline is Thursday, March 5, end of lab period.

Grading Criteria

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