Assignment HCI
The system
Design a system where your customers can buy some products or services from your company
The content of the assignment is as follows
- Describe your customers (experts, small specialis group, ordinary people, casual users, regular users)
- Describe the products you are going to sell
- What metaphor or general idea of presentation you are going to use
- What are the tasks that the user can do with your system
- What actions those tasks consist of
- How (with what tools the user can carry out those actions
- How the user can get assistance if in trouble
Your job is to design the interface and the actions that the user can take when doing business with you. You can assume that there is a functioning system behind your interface. You don't have to do any programming (unless you choose to do so).
Your system should consist of several pages or screens, which are connected. You can first design the screens as a storyboard, without a computer.
Decide how to connect the different screens.
Basic choices are
- Sequence: First - next - next - last
- Hierarchical structure: Root - where you can move to all the subpages and back
- Network of pages: You can move from page to page in the network.
The system should make it possible for the user to
- See your selection of products or services (one or more pages)
- Identify himself (give name - address -...)
- Select the goods he wants (checklist - menu - ...)
- Ask for the delivery of the products
- Maybe even check again what he has ordered - maybe even cancel the order
- Pay the order
- order a number of same products (4 chairs) (if it makes sense in your system)
The assignment
The assignment should be done in a group of 2-3 students.
The group should consist of IT experts and Human Factors Experts and Communication experts if possible.
The tutor for the assignment is Timo Kankaanpää (Dept. of Information Technology and Production economics) Factory 4th floor.
The assignments should be presented to Timo Kankaanpää. He also guides the work when needed. Timo can be met in his office wednesdays and fridays, regularly in other time confirm meeting with phone of email.
The assignment should be presented in two phases
- General plan (deadline 30.4.1996)
- General description
- Storyboard presentation of your pages (layout)
- Implementation and evaluation of the system (deadline 15.5.1996)
- Implement the interface using html or some other tool (a paper system will do if you have big problems).
- The system should be evaluated by some other group
- The second report should contain
- The system (report + url)
- How the system has developed since the first report
- Evaluation report (made by some other group - names of evaluators)
- The evaluation report should contain (about one page) assessment of
- General layout
- Suitability for the purpose
- Concepts: affordance and visibility
- Use of grahics and text in design (too much - too little, too big - too small ....)