Re-design and Extend

  • Group size: Teams of 3-4
  • Design Sprint Starts: Thursday, April 4, in class.
  • Design Sprint Ends (+): Tuesday, April 23: in class; design document end of day.

Overview

In this design sprint, we will revisit one of the previous design sprints. Which project we revisit will be determined by students voting in a survey. This page will be updated once the votes are in. This project will involve a few components.

Evaluate

You should begin by evaluating your previous design. You will first need to decide what your evaluation criteria are: what is important to assess about your design (learnability, accessibility, utility, ...)? How can you operationalize the measurement of this criteria? Revisit our lecture resources for evaluation methodologies (cognitive walkthrough, heuristic evaluation, usability study, etc) and decide if one of these is fitting for your evaluation goals. A good framework for thinking about this can be found in Research Contributions in Human-Computer Interaction by Jacob Wobbrock and Julie Kientz.

Your evaluation likely involves human subjects. Feel free to reach out to friends and classmates or other potential users of your target audience. That means you should make yourself available to your classmates to participate in their evaluations. You will likely need them to participate in yours as well. Some of this can be achieved during our hack day. Some of it will likely need to take place outside of class.

By this point in the semester, your group should be able to make informed and carefully rationalized decisions about the task, target user group, number of participants, conditions, and other details of the experimental design. You will need to justify these choices in your blog posts.

When in doubt, run your evaluation ideas by me.

Iterate

Next, reflect deeply on your evaluation results. How can you use what you learned to inform the next iteration of your design? You will want to describe this reflection in your blog post and go on to implement these changes in your design. That means you will have a new prototype that reflects these design changes.

Extend

In the final part of this project, you will be expanding on your previous design using a new prototying modality: physical prototyping. You can find some examples here.

How you choose to extend your previous project can take many forms, entirely up to your group. Be sure to clearly state your goals. Depending on which project you are extending, some examples you might consider are re-designing a wearable biosensor to collect additional health data, an accessible data physicalization experience, a integrating tangible objects in a virtual reality art viewer, etc. You should show evidence of iteration in your physical prototying as well. Check out this article on low-fidelity prototyping for guidance.

Tools

For this project, you will have access to tools and materials through The Hatchery at Emory (located at 1578 Avenue Place, Suite 200). They have materials ranging from foam core, playdoh, pipecleaners, wood blocks, xacto knives, cardboard, paint, markers, crayons, cricut cutter, 3D printer, etc. You may also choose to use materials you find at home around the house (cardboard, plastic bottles, old tshirts, etc).

Re-Evaluate

Now, given your new physical prototype, your group should design and execute a preliminary evaluation of this extension. Refer back to slides on Experience Prototyping, Heuristic Evaluation, Usability Studies, etc. This evaluation will gather preliminary feedback, but it should include well-informed and justified experimental design decisions.

Deliverables

  • As always: Your group's design reflection as a Medium blog post. You WILL need a demo video.
  • Your site should be publicly accessible so that others can visit it. Include this link in your design doc.
  • Post the link of each Medium post along with the names of your group members on our Slack channel for #group_design_projects and one group member should submit the link on Canvas.

  • Grading:
    • Grading will be based on the design rubric.
    • Be sure to complete the peer feedback forms linked at the end of the design document guide, which will be a large part of your grade.