Final assignments and presentations

Today I had a quick meeting with some of you during Marek’s course. We agreed on the following things:

• You will post some screenshots about the final UI design of your application to your project blog by Monday 09.05.
• If you need feedback from me, feel free to contact me any time and we can arrange meeting or I can send you some written comments.
• We are going to cancel individual assignment IA 2 Commenting the user interface prototypes. The prototypes were still in quite early phase and there is not enough time for commenting these, if we want to be done with the course by 12.05. You should better spend time on actual work with your prototypes.

The format of final presentations on 12.05 is 7+5 minutes (7 minutes for the presentation, 5 minutes for the discussion). About half of the presentation should cover different phases of the design process (personas, scenarios, user stories, paper prototypes) and the other half should focus on the final UI prototype.

Lesson on April 28th is cancelled

I have to cancel our lesson on April 28th. More information will be sent to you by e-mail.

Summary of yesterday’s lesson on user stories

Yesterday we focused on creating user stories about our applications. My presentation slides about the user story method can be found from SlideShare:

Before next lesson you have to complete one assignent: GA 3.1 writing user stories (deadline 13.03). Giraffe Experience group has already shared their user stories. Please make a short blog post as well where you link to the user stories. Then it is possible to give feedback to the user stories.

Next time we are going to create paper prototypes. I will bring the paper, but you will need one pair of scissors for each group and a drawing pen for each one. I am personally using Faber-Castell Fibre-tip pen ECCO PIGMENT pens (0.6 mm and 0.8 mm black), but other similar pens work as well. These are seriously better than the regular “sinine pastakas” type of pens :)

Today’s lesson and next assignments

I was nice to meet you today and see that you are all working on the projects. In the first part of the lesson we were looking through the personas that you have created. You can find my feedback and summary from Interaction Design Methods 2016.pdf file in Dropbox and Google Drive.

All together we have six group projects this year:

• Advanced Jukebox: Aleksandr, Almonzer, Ondřej
• iBeacon Navigation: Mubashar, Volodymyr, Mariia, Godfrey
• Japira: Jaak, Piret, Rasmus
• Giraffe Experience: Liina, Elina, Liga, Maciej, Amir
• Hangry Wolf: Sofia, Ilja, Mihkel, Indrek
• Fabolous Cats: Anni, Katrin, Julius, Ragnar

In the second part of the lesson I introduced shortly the scenario-based design method (slides) groups started preparing their scenarios. All groups should prepare 3…5 scenarios that describe typical use cases of their application. Please post the scenarios together with questions in group blog by this Sunday 21.02 (assignment GA 2.1). Please post each scenario as a separate blog post, this way it is better to comment on specific scenarios.

I posted on book chapter about scenario-based design to the Dropbox and Google Drive folders (Rosson_&_Carroll_2002.pdf):

Rosson, M. B., & Carroll, J. M. (2002). Scenario-Based Design. In J. A. Jacko & A. Sears (Eds.), The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications (pp. 1032–1050). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

During next week you should arrange a participatory design session based on your scenarios and post a summary (assignment GA 2.2). All groups should also prepare a concept map with most important concepts of the system / user interface (assignment GA 2.3) by 28.02.

As an individual assignment, I expect all of you to choose one of the other groups and comment their scenarios (assignment IA1). I will also comment all your scenarios next week.

Have a productive time and feel free to contact me in case of questions!

Update on group projects

Most of you have set up group blogs and started working on the projects. At the moment I have information about five projects:

Advanced Jukebox
Aleksandr, Almonzer
https://advancedjukebox.wordpress.com

iBeacon Navigation
Mubashar, Volodymyr, Mariia, Godfrey
https://ibeacontlu.wordpress.com

Japira
Jaak, Piret, Rasmus
https://jajapira.wordpress.com

Giraffe Experience
Liina, Elina, Liga, Maciej, Amir
https://tlugiraffeexperience.wordpress.com

Hangry Wolf
Sofia, Ilja, Mihkel, Indrek
http://hangrywolf7156.blogspot.com.ee

I have no information yet about six students. Recommended group size is 3…4 students, so I expect two additional project groups coming. Another option is one additional group project and 2 students joining with existing groups that have less members. But this has to be negotiated with existing groups.

I have set up also start.me page for following new blog posts and comments.

Recommended literature (part 1)

I promised to share some recommended readings with you. I will send you tonight invitations to the Dropbox folder that is already set up. If you prefer to get these resources through Google Drive, then ignore the Dropbox invitation and wait a little bit. I will deal with setting up the Google Drive folder and finding your TLU addresses next week.

The first topic was introduction to interaction design. For this topic, I can recommend chapters 1 and 2 from this book (Lowgren_&_Stolterman_2007_Chapter1.pdf and Lowgren_&_Stolterman_2007_Chapter2.pdf):

Löwgren, J., & Stolterman, E. (2007). Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

The second presentation was about qualitative research and personas. For this topic, I can recommend chapters 4 and 5 from this book (Cooper_et_al_2007_Chapter4.pdf and Cooper_et_al_2007_Chapter5.pdf):

Cooper, A., Reimann, R., & Cronin, D. (2007). About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Finally, I can recommend Chapter 10 from this book about doing a competitive review of similar applications (Brown_2010_Chapter10.pdf):

Brown, D. M. (2010). Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

This book has also a chapter about personas (Brown_2010_Chapter3.pdf). This could be read in addition to Cooper’s approach to personas.

Next steps

It was nice to meet all of you today. Now we will continue with next steps.

If you have not done it yet, please set up a group blog (using WordPress or Blogger) and post the blog address and group members’ names under Project ideas 2016. If you need feedback or assistance with choosing a topic for the group project, please contact me.

First assignment for you is group assignment 1.1 Creating personas. Please post your personas to group blog by 14.02. It would be better to post each persona as a separate blog post, then it is possible to write comments about each specific persona.

There is also an optional assignment about doing the contextual inquiry (OA 1). If you have time to do this, then focus on competitive review of similar systems.

I will soon also share the course readings with you.

Presentation slides from the first meeting

You can find presentation slides from the first meeting in SlideShare.

Introduction to the course:

Introduction to Interaction Design:

Contextual Inquiry and Personas in Interaction Design:

Project ideas 2016

Please post your project ideas as comments to this post (including project name, names of group members, link to group blog, other relevant URL’s).

From the HCI integrated courses, we should have four projects:

• Advanced Jukebox (3 members)
• iBeacon Navigation (4 members)
• Giraffe Experience (5 members)
• Cool Game Idea (3 members)

Interaction Design Methods course 2016

IFI7156.DT Interaction Design Methods course 2016 will start on Friday 05.02. Course blog has been updated with the schedule and assignments for 2016. Detailed course programme (PDF) is available at the TLU School of Digital Technologies web site. Learning resources in the course blog will be updated before the lectures.

Registration to the courses is open through the study information system ÕIS until 08.02. If somebody outside HCI master programme is interested in taking the course, you are welcome to the first lecture on 05.02 at 15.00-16.30 in room A-303. In case of questions, feel free to contact me at hans.poldoja@tlu.ee