I took this class my Senior year in College. It is one of my favorite research areas and I continue my studies in it to this day.
Broadly stated, there are four goals for this class:
1) Understand the principles of user-centered design and how to apply them to a software-based project
2) Understand the history of human-computer interaction and how it’s changed over time
3) Explore why “good” interface design is not necessarily “common sense”
4) Utilize skills and knowledge from other disciplines in developing a software-based project
During the semester we primarily focused on one project as described in the syllabus:
You will undertake a group project to:
+ evaluate some computing-related task/problem
+ develop interface design alternatives for the task/problem
+ implement a prototype of your design
+ evaluate your design
The theme for this semester’s projects is:
Connecting to (*) You.
You should think of this domain as exploring how technological innovation can help an individual become the person they want to be. Thus, the * in the domain above can be “a better”, “a wealthier”, a “healthier”, etc. By design, this is a large and rich domain to explore and we will help you investigate ideas for different problems to explore in this solution. The critical aspect of selecting a problem is that it must matter to some “real-life” people. These people can be a small group of individuals, or a large one, or any group in-between, but they will serve as your “clients” whom you must communicate with and learn from.
Tempus Fugit is a tool that will help people use their spare time more effectively and efficiently. We want to help busy individuals focus more time and effort on items that are of the highest priority in their lives. Tempus Fugit will help preserve and organize important tasks and goals that other time management systems do not. Specifically, it will address tasks or goals which are important but not specifically or rigidly scheduled by time. We want to create a system that maximizes the use of a person’s daily schedule by helping that person accomplish their personalized and prioritized to-do list during empty blocks of time. Ultimately, we want to develop a system that makes intelligent recommendations of what is best to do at any given time by integrating task lists, calendars, user profiles, and geographic locations. We want a personalized self-organizing daily calendar that just makes sense. To understand what people need to manage their time and prioritize life goals, the research team created an online survey with 54 responses, conducted 13 in-depth interviews, and read academic articles on different subjects, including time management.
We have now completed the first prototype of our Tempus Fugit time and event management application. This first interactive version was created from the common components of our first four designs. This prototype either provides most of the core functionalities that are necessary to meet our most important user requirements, and this report will provide an overview of that functionalities. In addition to providing a description and walkthrough of the system itself, the report will summarize our evaluation plan and list our usability specifications.
We have now completed the first evaluation of our first prototype. This completes the first iteration of our interaction-design lifecycle. The results, findings, and observations that will be presented in this report will guide the next iteration. These results will help clarify our current design choices and lead us to new ones. We will first use the results from our evaluation to reestablish and fine-tune our user requirements and needs. The cycle will then continue with a redesign phase followed by the next interactive prototype. This evaluation was designed to be as complete and thorough as was possible given our resources and time. We had one and a half weeks to enact the evaluation plan that was presented in our last report. During this time our research team was able to perform usability testing, field studies, and expert evaluations.
