courses /spring 09 /250 B /roadmap

What next?

1. We need to build a consensus for our group idea. I won't have time to post my proposal until later tonight (I left it on one of the SOE machines), but reading eachother's proposals should help us see the common ideas, e.g. common_ideas.pdf--which is not finished presently. I believe that consensus is building and a good idea is emerging--my preference is the common idea that Patricia and others raised about the "supply-chain community" especially. (Is this a good idea? Well how about if we write a survey and sample opinions from our target audiences, e.g. do prison workers care about this? Does a prison worker want to see labor issues about her working conditions brought to light? How about "iPhone Girl", would she be interested enough to contribute to something like this? Could we mock-up what this thing would look like and show it to her?)

2. Once we have the idea as best we can all envision it. We then need to drill down on it very concretely. I recommend we follow the project roadmap as specified on Sri Kurniawan (SOE-HCI: Human-Computer Interaction) This site really has a lot of useful resources for how to move forward and has good creative ideas for how to gather user feedback and develop the documents we will need to move forward. The project page(hci_project) has examples of the documents that I believe we should aim to produce. I have summarized the elements of the roadmap below, but the details are on Sri's main page.

The roadmap forces everyone to think very specifically and provides concrete documentation of the product, i.e. about the subtasks (hierarchical task diagram), the user profiles ("Personas"),use scenarios, use cases, low- and hi-fidelity protoypes.

A critical (often creative and fun) component of these last steps, the prototypes, is the gathering of user feedback. Gathering user evaluations at the early stages of product development helps to identify/clarify problems in the overall design and direction of the product development lifecycle--catching design problems that can arise from developers being too attached to "their" preferred ideas before engineering effort is spent on dead-ends.

Roadmap

• Project proposal (We are currently trying to synthesize one of these)

  1. project description
  2. target audience
  3. why it is interesting
• User requirement report: here is a document describing what should be included in the requirements report.

• Low-fidelity prototype

  1. a storyboard of the interface
  2. a hierarchical task diagram for all of the tasks supported by the system
  3. a hierarchical representation of all of the functions that your system supports (for this I would strongly suggest that you do a card sorting exercise with your users)
• High fidelity prototype. Here is a document describing what should be included in this report.
• evaluation report: described here.

--zeb