Go back to top

Toggle Light / Dark / Auto color theme

Toggle accessibility options

Toggle page contents sidebar

Important

This project milestone is considered a summative evaluation of the entire term’s work or a portion of the term’s work. As such, it will be treated as a “take-home final exam” with respect to course content, and the associated grade will be placed under a higher-weighted grade item in the “Term Project” category.

Milestone 4: Prototyping & Testing

Due Date

TUE 2023-05-09 @ 11:55 PM via Piazza @24.

Introduction

Objective

In this milestone, you will use the knowledge that you gained from Milestone 3, DDQs, and the required readings to develop and evaluate a high-fidelity user experience design prototype for your problem of study based on your proposed designs. The prototype should be sophisticated enough to allow potential users to experience content and interactions in the interface.

Dissemination

This milestones will include a deliverable report. These report should be in PDF or HTML format and be publicly-accessible via your team’s public home page. The specific format of these deliverable report is up to your team, but it should appear professionally-prepared.

Instructions

1. Prepare the following deliverables for this milestone, all of which should be included in the deliverable report you create and link to via “Milestone 4” under “Milestone Links” on your group’s public home page.

   Warning

   Even if you are not explicitly asked, you must provide supporting evidence for any claims you make in your deliverable report. This information should come from a variety of different venues, such as academic conferences, news reports, interviews, questionnaires, etc. Make sure you use proper, consistent citations in your reports and justify any unusual sources.

   A. High-Fidelity Prototype

   1. Based on the detailed designs you developed in the previous milestone, produce a high fidelity prototype of the proposed user interface. Remember, unlike a wireframe or mockup, a prototype is often clickable and thus allows the user to experience content and interactions in the interface. In many cases, users might think they’re using a real application when testing a really good, high fidelity prototype.

      • The elements of your prototype should be presented in a consistent manner and in a way that viewers can see all wired artboards at once and individually (perhaps by clicking).

      Additional Expectations

      • You are expected to use use a UX software tool to create your prototype (e.g., Adobe XD, Figma, etc.). You must provide a download link for any source files and assets needed in addition to one or more exported PNG files of the artboards.

      • You are expected to provide proper attribution for each asset that your team uses that you did not personally create. Unless you see a notice to the contrary, you should assume that assets your team did not author are subject to copyright restrictions. In the United States fair use is a doctrine applied to copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. If appropriate, you should include a “fair use statement” on your website – an example statement can be seen here.

   2. Each prototype in (A.1) needs to relate to one or more of your related, relevant user stories from (A.2) in the previous milestone. To demonstrate this, you should do the following for each relevant user story:

      • restate the user story along with an extended description that explains how the design elements of your prototype address your problem of study with respect to that specific user story; and

      • provide one or more short video demos of someone using your prototype to accomplish the narrative described by that specific user story.

      Additional Expectations

      You are expected to produce demo videos from the perspective of the user in the user story. You may provide audio or text commentary; however, each demo should be less, “explaining what the user will do,” and more, “explaining what the user is doing.” You may need more than one video demo per user story if there is more than one typical path for accomplishing the related task or activity. These videos are separate from the final summary video described by (C).

      You are expected to do what’s described above with most of the user stories you outlined in (A.2) of the previous milestone. If, for any reason, you are unable to demo a user story as described above using your prototype, then you must substitute the video with a strong, convincing argument that both explains and justifies why you’re unable to demo it. Your instructor will weigh the merits of any such substitution against its impact on your ability to tackle your problem of study when determining how it will impact your grade for this part of the assignment.

   Note

   Due to time constraints, part (B) of this project milestone is scaled back from what was originally planned. You will not be required to actually conduct any user testing; however, you will be required to adequately describe a protocol for user testing. Students who are interested in realizing their protocols should reach out to Dr. Cotterell to discuss continuing their term project in CSCI 4960, CSCI 6950, or CSCI 7000. The CSCI 4960 course is one way for undergraduates to to earn Experiential Learning credit for graduation and is highly recommended for those considering graduate school.

   B. Testing Protocol

   1. A user testing protocol describes the objective(s), methodology, and organization of a user test; it essentially describes how to administer a user test and how the data can be used to answer your research question. For this part of the milestone, you should describe your protocol by answering the following questions:

      • What is your research question? It should be simple, falsifiable, and related to the effectiveness of your design in solving your problem of study.

      • Based on your research question, what methodology will you use for testing and why? Some examples include:

        • Observation / Participant Observation.

        • Surveys.

        • Interviews.

        • Focus Groups.

        • Experiments.

        • Secondary Data Analysis / Archival Study.

        • Mixed Methods (combination of some of the above)

   2. Based on the methodology you chose in (B.1), describe your testing procedure. Regardless of methodology, your testing procedure needs to involve your design prototype from (A). Also, be sure to incorporate answers to the following questions in your description:

      • What is your specific plan to deal with informed consent?

      • What specific data will you collect and how will it be organized?

      • What type of analysis do you intend to to perform with the study data, and how will that analysis help answer your research question from (B.1)?

      • How might you conduct your testing procedure safely during a pandemic?

   C. Final Summary Video

   1. Create a 10-20 minute video that summarizes your term project, including the new information and deliverables in parts (A) and (B) of this milestone. Here are the specific requirements:

      • Introduce yourself: include your team name and a short overview of your problem of study and proposed solution.

      • Show how your design evolved from what you proposed to what you ended up with: using work from previous milestones and part (A) of this milestone, provide viewers with commentary regarding how your design changed over time. This should culminate with a “showcase” demonstration of your prototype that highlights what you ended up with in a way that connects your design decisions back to your problem of study – if you use clips from any of the demos you produced in part (A), then please integrate them in a way that keeps this “showcase” idea in mind.

      • Discuss your testing protocol, including the experimental design and how the data you ascertain from the study might be used to determine if your design successfully tackles your problem of study.

      • Finish by providing a brief summary of what you learned while working on this project, including what parts you thought were the most useful and what parts you enjoyed the most.

      Additional Expectations

      • You are expected to involve all team members in The creation of this video, and the video itself should contain credits at the end describing who did what.

      • You are expected to provide a link to the video in your milestone deliverable report; if your report is an HTML page, then you may embed the video into the page in addition to providing the link.

2. Prior to the milestone deadline, one team member needs to post the following information in a followup discussion to Piazza @24.

   1. Team Name

   2. Team Member Names

   3. Brief Synopsis – shorter than what’s on your home page

   4. Link to your group home page

   5. A few sentences describing what you thought was easy/hard about this particular milestone

Grading

Item	Points	Assessment
Updated Public Home Page	10%	Pass / Fail
High-Fidelity Prototype	30%	Rubric
Testing Protocol	30%	Rubric
Final Summary Video	30%	Rubric

For this assignment, any portion that is designated as using a rubric will be graded on a 30-point scale that coincides with a rubric designed to mirror the related prompts. Be sure to address every aspect of a prompt.