Learning Outcomes of IMAT5209 Human Interactions In Systems Design
This assignment is designed to provide practical experience of analysing
usability requirements, and carrying out an analysis of usability requirements and priorities, performing a systematic usability evaluation using a standard method, and producing a report of your findings.
Submission and Marking Procedure
Part A: Individual entries on the Module Group Discussion Board for 7 Tutorials. It is worth 25% of the total mark for the module.
Part B: This is an individual assignment. It is worth 75% of the total mark for the module.
Your report should be submitted electronically as a Word document via the
Turnitin link for Assignment Two under Assessment on Blackboard, and should be submitted in hardcopy form at FOTAC.
Task
Your firm of interaction design consultants is trying to build up a portfolio of impressive work, to enable it to pitch for business convincingly in the future.
Your task is to produce a set of usability requirements and a usability
evaluation of an interactive system, plus a report of your results, by applying a systematic evaluation methodology. You have a completely free choice of what interactive system you evaluate.
Carrying out the Assignment
Producing the usability evaluation assignment will involve
- Choosing an interactive system to study.
- Identifying the use cases or aspects of the functioning of the system to be considered, and briefly describing them in your documentation. (These don’t need to be a complete set of use cases; for very complicated systems focusing on one part of what they do is just fine. However you should give a clear indication of what subset of the functionality of the system you are considering, and what you are not considering. If in doubt, cover less functionality in more detail.)
- Define a set of usability requirements, considering what the design really needs to get right to achieve a good user experience, and defining the requirements precisely enough that it would be possible to measure the system’s performance.
- Choosing an evaluation methodology. You should apply a standard evaluation methodology such as user testing, cognitive walkthrough, or heuristic evaluation.
- Defining an evaluation procedure. This will include stating one or several user tasks to be tested or considered with exact descriptions of the scenario and the goal the user is trying to achieve, as well as what the evaluator will do to collect results and produce an evaluation. The evaluation procedure needs to be described in full, separately from the description of the results.
- Carrying out the evaluation. This will involve applying the procedure and documenting what happens, and what the procedure finds. (If applying your procedure looks like an excessive amount of work, or producing an excessively large volume of documentation, ask advice; we would prefer an evaluation giving detailed insight into part of the functionality to an evaluation with broad coverage but a thinner or more superficial analysis.)
- Deriving findings about the usability of the interactive system from the results of the usability evaluation. This should include consideration of how strong and how general the conclusions are.
The learning outcomes that are assessed by this coursework are:
- Practical experience of analysing usability needs
- Practical experience of formulating precise, testable usability requirements
- Practical experience of carrying out a usability evaluation of an interactive system using a standard systematic method
- Experience of report writing
Tasks to be undertaken:
Part A: submit 7 entries based on the seminars to the discussion group on
Blackboard
Part B:
- Select a suitable interactive system
- Produce brief description of system and users
- Produce brief description of subset of functionality considered
- Formulate a set of 5 precise, testable usability requirements
- Define and describe a systematic evaluation procedure
- Apply the procedure and document the results
- Write a brief evaluation of the usability of the interactive system