HCI 440

Fall 2022

Craig Miller

Weekly Notes

Assignments

Team Project 1
User Research and Report
Due Sunday October 9 before 11:30pm

Overview

For this first phase of the team project, you will further research your chosen domain of inquiry and conduct contextual interviews with prospective users. With the goal of describing the current context of activities, you will analyze and present your findings as personas and organized activity concepts.

Contextual Inquiry

With the project proposal as a starting point, each individual should conduct two contextual interviews, which will produce 6, 8 or 10 sets of interview notes. When conducting your interviews, make sure you follow ethical practices regarding informed consent and the confidentiality of your users.

Personas and Scenarios

Consolidate interview notes from similar users to produce 2-4 personas. Using the book example or the online examples as a guide, create personas based on the interview notes. With each persona, develop a couple of scenarios that describe this fictitious user acting in the domain of your root concept.

Drawing upon methods presented in class and in chapter 4 (ch. 8 2nd edition), develop and organize activity concepts that describe the current context of user actions. Focus on concepts such as problems, preferences, needs and motivations that will ultimately yield effective design requirements. Note that design requirements will not be developed at this time.

Report Contents

Your submitted report should contain the following sections:

  • Executive summary. Develop a one to two paragraph statement that summarizes your proposed project, interview process and a couple major findings (e.g. findings that suggest requirements).
  • Process overview. Summarize your interview process and how you developed the personas and activity concepts.
  • Personas and activity concepts. Provide a summary statement of the personas, followed by the personas and their activities.
  • Appendix materials. Appendix includes process details (e.g. questions, individual notes from the interviews and any other supporting documents. Also include how individuals contributed to the project.

Team Process

The following is a recommended set of team phases and deadlines:

  • Inquiry Plan (Friday September 30). Create a shared document that describes how the data gathering is to be conducted. This includes who qualifies as potential users, what common questions you will ask and what you will observe.
  • Conduct inquiries (Monday October 3). Each team member conducts two contextual inquiries with at least two potential users. Post notes in a shared document. Each team participant should extract out user characteristics in a persona-like form and lists of activity notes (see section 4.3 as examples).
  • Consolidation (Friday October 7). Group together users with common activity notes into personas. Group together related activity notes into themes.
  • Finalize report (Sunday October 9). Write executive summary. Edit and proofread. Submit!

Submission

Submit your report to D2L as a PDF document.

Grading

This project is worth 10% of the course grade (5% as a joint grade and 5% as individual contributions). The following criteria will be used for scoring the report:

  • Report organization and presentation. The report is well written and organized so that it is easy to find required information.
  • Report completeness. The report has all required contents. You are strongly encouraged to review all requirements on this page before you submit your report.
  • Process. The report shows that the proper process (e.g. ethical interviewing) was followed for obtaining the report contents.
  • Supported findings. The personas and activity concepts are clearly derived from the notes.