Yorkville High School Computer Science

App Development :: Projects :: Mobile App

Problem

This is a working implementation of your project. By the deadline your implementation should be complete in the sense that you are ready to test users on the tasks you used for your paper prototype. Your implementation should have both frontend and backend. User interactions should be live, not canned responses.

No written report is required for this part. Instead, you will demonstrate your implementation to Mr. Miller on the due date. You will have a 10-minute time slot. Within this time, you will have to:

• brief Mr. Miller about your application's purpose and user population
• take Mr. Miller on a guided tour of the interface
• let Mr. Miller try the interface for himself
• answer Mr. Miller's questions about your design decisions and development process

User Testing

In this part you will evaluate your interface with a small user test and write a final reflection.

Find at least 3 representative users from your target population. None of your users should have been enrolled in User Interface Design at any point. All should be willing to participate voluntarily.

Prepare a briefing and tasks. These may be the same ones that you used in paper prototyping, but you may need to improve them based on feedback from the paper prototyping.

You may, if you wish, also prepare a short demo of your interface that you can use to show your users the purpose of the system. The demo should be scripted so that you do and say the same things for each user. It should use a concrete example task, but the example task should be sufficiently different from the test tasks to avoid bias. The demo option is offered because some interfaces are learned primarily by watching someone else use the interface. Think carefully about whether your interface is in this category before you decide to use a demo, because the demo will cost you information. Once you've demonstrated how to use a feature, you forfeit the chance to observe how the user would have learned to use it alone.

Pilot test your briefing, demo, and tasks, before you test your real users. You can use another member of the class for your pilot testing, if you wish.

Conduct a formative evaluation with each user:

• Provide your briefing and (optionally) demo.
• Then provide the tasks one at a time, observe, and take notes.

You can choose to facilitate the user testing or take notes. You should enlist someone else, ideally someone who has taken User Interface Design, to fulfill the other role. You can use screen capture software such as Camtasia Studio if you'd like to supplement your notes.

Collect the usability problems found by your user tests into a list. Assign each problem a severity rating (cosmetic, minor, major, catastrophic), and brainstorm possible solutions for the problems.

App Submission

Submit your app to the Google Play or App Store. It can take up to 48 hours for your app to be approved so submit well ahead of the project deadline. Your app may also be rejected. If it is rejected, fix any issues that led to the rejection and resubmit.

What To Turn In

A Google Doc with the following subsections:

Design

Describe the final design of your app (after implementing changes following user testing). Illustrate with screenshots. Point out important design decisions and discuss the design alternatives that you considered. Particularly, discuss design decisions that were motivated by the two evaluations you did (paper prototyping and user testing).

Implementation

Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.

Evaluation

Describe how you conducted your user test. Describe how you found your users and how representative they are of your target user population (but don't identify your users by name). Describe how the users were briefed and what tasks they performed; if you did a demo for them as part of your briefing, justify that decision. List the usability problems you found, and discuss what you did (if anything) to solve them.

Reflection

Explain how your app follows the ten elements of the user interface design guidelines you targeted at the beginning of the semester.

Discuss what you learned over the course of the iterative design process. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Focus in this part not on the specific design decisions of your project (which you already discussed in the Design section), but instead on the meta-level decisions about your design process: your risk assessments, your decisions about what features to prototype and which prototype techniques to use, and how you evaluated the results of your observations.