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M8: Milestone Ranch

Plan your usability evaluation (10 points)

In lecture, you have been introduced to three different usability evaluation techniques: heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough and think aloud protocol analysis. You are asked in this milestone to select one of these evaluation techniques and justify why you feel it would be appropriate to evaluate the prototype from the other team. You then need to make sure that you have prepared all of the required inputs to conduct the usability evaluation. This section should clearly indicate which method you chose, why you chose it and what you hope to learn from it. You should also detail any preparations (ratings scales, criteria) that developed for the evaluation.

Execute the plan (30 points)

Your team needs to conduct the usability evaluation that you defined in your plan and present the raw results in (e.g., the usability bug reports from h.e., the believability story for one or more canonical tasks for cognitive walkthrough, the transcript and observations done for the think aloud) in a form that can be understood by the instructor and TA. These results need to be produced in written format, so be sure to plan your evaluation in such as way as to make it easy to collect these results and share them. This section has all the details for your plan execution. This section has to convince me that you actually carried out the plan. You should include the raw data, any checklists and other information, and a discussion of the results as deliberated by your team.

Usability Report (30 points)

You need to write a report of your usability findings that will be submitted to the instructor as well as the team whose prototype you evaluated. This report should be no longer than 3 printed pages and should clearly highlight and explain the top 3 or 4 recommendations for altering the prototype to enhance its usability. You are writing this report for the design team to read and react to, so make sure you are clear and constructive in your comments so that they understand what you are asking them to change and why. If there are some things that were particularly good, you can mention them also. Don't be afraid to be honest. Your evaluation has no effect on their grade – regardless of whether their UI is magnificent or horrible.
These first three parts of the milestone are due Friday, November 19th to be turned in in-class in hard-copy. You must also provide a copy of the 3-page Usability Report to the team whose prototype you evaluated. This is to facilitate the final part of the project. Please be sure you get the other team the report in a timely manner.

Response (30 points)
We are not asking the design teams to do any additional implementations to the project. Instead, we are asking you to read the report from the evaluation team and respond to the way you would modify your design and implementation to accommodate the recommended changes. This report should be no longer than 3 pages and should focus on explaining how you would adapt your prototype. We also want you to reflect on whether the object-oriented approach to your design makes it easier or more difficult to make the recommended changes. Please do not be defensive. Your grade is not based on how bad the UI faults were, it is based on your corrective action proposals. Don't try to convince me there are no problems with your UI and the other team was just stupid. Instead detail what you would fix and what changes to the design would be required. Remember this is a design class, so be sure and discuss the impact of your design on the ease of incorporating the changes requested.

GOALS:
Goal 1:
We wanted to a very extensive review where we tried to be as encouraging as possible
Goal 2:
We wanted to make sure we did it in a manner where we were completely novice to the game


Our Usability Plan:
M8_Final.doc

Our Heuristic Checklist:
heuristic checklist.doc

Our Usability Report:
Usability Report.doc

Our Response to the Usability Report:
M8 Response.pdf

What Worked and What Didn’t Work

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