Usability requirements through ethnographic observations or other requirement gathering techniques, typically directly involving the target users.
Initial design and follow-up design evaluation-and-refinement cycles/iterations following user-centered design (UCD), participatory design (PD), or other UI design frameworks/methodologies and related techniques..
Choice of appropriate interaction styles and detailed design decisions with justification.
Implementation of the UI design.
(Warning: Don’t get bogged down on this! The focus of your project should be on UI design and evaluation, not implementation.)
Evaluation (of design, prototypes, and/or implementation) through expert reviews, usability testing, or other appropriate usability evaluation techniques. Pay particular attention to your concrete, and ideally some quantitative, usability metrics to be used for evaluation.
Identification of problems for further usability improvement and/or for process improvement.
Followup improvement cycles as a second (and third, and …) iteration of some of the above steps.
The most important elements are the design AND evaluation activities performed by you. An acceptable project must include BOTH these elements and related activities, although you may choose to focus on one while only performing limited amount/scope of activities on the other. For example:
For a project focusing on design, such as designing a new system and its UI, design prototypes of different levels of details are expected, and supported by the accompanying evaluation activities that lead to the subsequent refinements/modifications of the initial design. In addition, at least some evaluation needs to be performed to demonstrate its usability.
For a project focusing on evaluation, such as evaluating an existing system, be sure to include some objective/quantitative usability metrics and related data (and analysis of the data). For example, you should not only relying on general survey feedback and/or subjective rating of the UI from expert reviews. Detailed data from usability testing and/or actual usage measurement data that can be used to quantify usability would be appropriate here. In addition, you still need to have some design elements, such as changed and/or enhanced I.S. with justification, design sketches of an improved/modified system/UI, etc. based on your evaluation results.
For a group project, typically consisting of two team members, both the design and evaluation aspects must be covered with significant amount of corresponding activities/results for BOTH. In addition, more elements among the above (and/or with more in-depth treatment of these elements), a larger system, and more detailed/elaborated design/(possible implementation)/evaluation/repeating-the-cycle activities should be included, appropriate for the group. The group size of 3 or more needs special approval from the instructor.
Several other considerations are also listed below:
It’s generally a good idea to consider multiple design techniques, interaction styles, and evaluation methods and actually use a couple from each category in your project to get a hands-on feeling/experience of how different techniques, styles and methods work in practical applications.
Try to be as specific as possible in each of your activities. For example, when you evaluate the usability of your system, consider:
What is/are your specific evaluation technique(s)?
How about other techniques that might be appropriate?
What’s the basis for comparison (baseline)?
What usability metrics are to be used?
How to collection the data needed?
Most importantly, it’s a project where you design/(possible implement)/evaluate (“do”) UI for some system and report the activities/results/findings/etc. Concrete design artifacts need to be produced, and/or quantitative (and qualitative) evaluation results need to obtained. Therefore, a general discussion of or even a comprehensive survey about UI/UX and related topics and activities will not be an acceptable project.
