CSC 484 Assignment 2
Storyboarding and Class Project Selection
DUE: Website, on or before 11:00AM Wednesday 30 April
Oral presentation in lecture, 30 April
Poster sessions in lab, 30 Apr & 2 May
POINTS POSSIBLE: 100
WEIGHT: 10% of total class grade
READING: Textbook Chs 10-11; Week 3 research paper
This assignment is to be done in a team of approximately six members. You can continue with your team from Assignment 1, or join a different team.
The most specific purpose of the assignment is to produce a set of storyboards for an interesting product idea. The other purpose is to explore a term project topic for the class.
The default project theme is productivity software for post- secondary education. "Default" means that you may work on a project in an entirely different area. However, if your team has nothing else in mind, then post-secondary education is a reasonable application domain. This is our collective area of expertise, as students and faculty in this class.
"Productivity software" means it improves the educational lives of students and/or faculty. I.e., it's something we can all use in our work at Poly.
If your team wants to work on a different type of project, I'm happy to discuss the possibilities. It need not be in the educational domain, and it need not be software. It must be related to the general class theme of interaction design, in which humans interact with some type of electronic product.
We will spend time in lecture on Wednesday discussing your possible project selections. Even if you are not sure of a term project topic, you need a work area for the storyboarding task of Assignment 2.
The specific topic area is up to each team. There were a number of interesting topics listed on the questionnaires from the first lab. Since team compositions have fluctuated somewhat, I will let individual members share their ideas with other members, rather than providing a specific list of topics here.
As described in the syllabus, a term project may involve the development of a prototype product, or a rigorous usability study of an existing product. My preference is the former. Further, my preference is for a prototype that involves some new and innovative ideas. Do something interesting and fun!
The storyboards you produce for this assignment are designed to explain your product ideas in high-level form, in an interesting and eye-catching way. You are building what the book calls a "low-fidelity prototype" (Chapter 11, Section 11.2.3, Page 531).
The presentation details are up to you, but your storyboards should address the following issues:
Physically, the storyboards should be produced in a good-looking electronic form. You can do plenty of hand sketching for your own discussions, but the presented storyboards should not contain rough hand-drawn sketches. If you have one or more particularly artistic members of the team, you can have some hand-drawn panels. Bottom line -- the storyboards need to look good and professional.
There is no specific size limit on your storyboards, other that the 3'x4' maximum noted in the UIST guidelines (see below). Around ten storyboard panels should be the maximum, where each panel is approximately an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of paper.
The culmination of this assignment is a two-day poster session, held in lab during week 5.
The poster sessions will held during Wednesday and Friday of week 5 labs. The reason for spending two days is to give everyone ample time to perform the following required activities:
The overall style of the 484 sessions will be very similar to the poster
sessions planned for this year's ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and
Technology (UIST2008). See
Follow the physical guidelines outlined on the site, including the maximum
poster size of 3' x 4'. There are a number of interesting examples posted on
the site.
http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2008/call/index.html#Posters
In our lab, each team will set up on one of the six rows of tables. Posters must be free standing on the tables. They can rest on two or three computer monitors, supported in front by keyboards. On one of the visible (non-support) monitors, you will have your assignment/project website up, in case visitors want to see details that are not shown in the storyboards.
During the presentations, each team will discuss their ideas for poster visitors, i.e., other people in the class. During the visits, you should take notes on what people say. The specific format of the notes is up to you, but you should have the organizational ideas of note-taking in place before your sessions.
You don't want to come across as a cross examiner to your visitors. Answer their questions, and ask some of your own, but not in an overly structured manner.
To gather detailed information, each team is required to produce a brief questionnaire, to be filled out by all visitors. As with other project aspects, there is no fixed format for the questionnaire, but it should not exceed one paper page, and be limited to ten or fewer questions. You can used the extensive available guidelines for producing questionnaires, in the book and online.
You can provide questionnaires in paper or online form. DO NOT spend a lot of time producing an online questionnarie if you don't already know how to do it. Paper is fine for this assignment.
Prior to the first poster session, during lecture time on Wednesday, each team will give a very brief overview of their poster. The time limit for the presentations is one minute per team member. This is patterned after the "1-minute" madness sessions at SIGCHI, UIST, and other conferences.
In addition to the presentation and poster, your team will produce a website for the assignment, with the following information:
During Week 5 of class:
The physical deliverable for each team is the website. In addition, each individual must deliver to me a paper or electronic copy of each questionnaire you fill out. These copies are for me to record that everyone did in fact fill out the questionnaires.
intro presentation: 10%
poster itself: 50%
session hosting: 10%
questionnaire: 10%
session participation: 10%
completed questionnaires: 10%