In the first stage of 3.1 you will work together to come up with the group's consolidated design. This is where you go through your individual designs and synthesize a single design that combines the best of all your ideas. In 2.3 you presented an overall critque of the individual designs, so you at least started the discussions about the strong and weak aspects of the individual sketches. In 3.1 you will actually perform the consolidation process. You may even find that there will be more advantages and disadvantages uncovered when you actually start the consolidation process that you did not see when you were only critique the design.
Develop one set of sketches and a brief rationale explaining why your group has taken such an approach. Why is the new design better? Remember that this is a course about designing user interfaces, so discuss these issues with reference to attributes that are important to the user. Is the navigation now superior to the individual designs? Has the choice of design elements made the application more engaging and enjoyable to use? Do the designs suffer from any cognitive load issues?
The sketch becomes important since the group will conduct usability walkthroughs of the paper prototypes.
Your sketches will have a sequence of images representing the user interface at various stages of a task. You will need to refer back to your original scenarios to see if those scenarios actually represent the new consolidated design. If they don't then refine the scenarios so that they do relate to the new design.Keep in mind that scenarios are used as part of explaining the context of the task to your participants.
Scenarios also help you validate your design. Early scenarios may make reference to aspects of the task that are important and they may have been inadvertedly omitted in the current design.
Once your group has stabilised the consolidated design, it is now time to prepare the materials for a usability walkthrough of the paper base prototype. As we have discussed in lectures you can augment ordinary paper mock ups with post-it notes and other novel uses of paper to bring more interactivity into the design.
You will need to plan the goals for the usability walkthrough and decide which aspects of the design you are going to evaluate. Develop a list of tasks that you plan to evaluate as part of the walkthrough session. Consider what materials, screens, scenarios will be used for each of those tasks. Developing a series of questions to ask before and after may help focus on the issues you plan to evaluate.
Remember to prepare the ethics documentation as well.
The sessions should each take 30-60 minutes and we recommend that you conduct these as a group since there is a lot of work to do and it is important that everyone is present to discuss what was observed during the session. The walkthrough process is a key part of the learning experience. It also make sense to have several of your group in the session so that one person can facilitate by managing the paper prototype and another can keep a log of what happened during the session. Record this information in your design diary.
At the end of each session, your group should review the outcomes of the session and decide whether there were any critical observations that should be included into the next session with your next participant. Don't feel compelled to change everything just because one participant had a certain opinion. In fact for this set of tests, you don't want to make too many changes between walkthrough sessions. You are looking for trends in the sessions not just one off instances of possible issues.
We would be extremely surprised if these tests yield no changes to the design, especially in this early immature stage of development.This is also why you are conducting a debriefing session immediately after each walkthrough.
Document the review discussion so that you have a record of this meeting. Do the same for each subsequent session.You may want to explore using afffinity diagramming in this stage to note down issues. At the end you will be able to start categorising the issues. This will help in the write up of 3.1.
In terms of tabulating the findings your group should create a table that has issue description down the vertical and user number across the top. Into each associated grid put a tick in the table to identify which user(s) uncovered or raised certain issues. This will give you a chart that will show the evolution of the issues.
| Issue | User 1 |
User 2 |
User 3 |
| 1. Could not locate the help system | X |
X |
|
| 2. Did not understand the "green house" term | X |
||
| 3. Incorrectly used the colour pop up menu | X |
X |
X |
As you read across the table, you will see how many people experienced each issue. Reading down you count how many problems each user encountered.
If you keep track of these issues over the course of development (and you should for 3.1 and 3.2) you would want to see that problems are resolved over time. You may also find that new features or changes to your system could create new issues.
At the end of all of the walkthrough sessions you will need to meet to summarise the findings of all the sessions. Note what the observations mean for the next iteration of the design.This should describe the positive aspects of the evaluation but also describe issues that need to be considered in the next iteration.
One set of paper sketches of the consolidated design, pages depends on your design but no more than 10
Text discussion of why your consolidated design is better - max 3 pages
A copy of the walkthrough plan, what you intended to cover in the walkthrough sessions - 1-2 pages
Summary of the walkthrough sessions including a check box table with the issues and in which session the issue was exposed - 3 pages
In an appendix
A copy of the scenarios used to brief the participants
A log of all group meetings and walkthrough session. This could be in the form of meeting minutes but should document who was at the meeting and a summary of the contributions.