Reference no: EM133029552

CTEC 3906 Interaction Design - De Montfort University

Novel Ecommerce System Design Sketches

LO 1. Ability to apply key general principles of usability, both to guide effective design and to evaluate existing systems.

LO 2. Ability to propose a suitable system design that aligns with the cognitive capabilities of its target human stakeholders and fits the needs of different users for different tasks and environments.

LO 3. Ability to select and deploy an appropriate prototyping approach in response to a given systems development situation.

This assignment is designed to get you to practise and develop your skills in applying a user-centred approach to designing an interactive system, and practice and develop your skills in planning, sketching and storyboarding user interface designs.

Task

The assignment is based on the work you are expected to do in your seminars, developing ideas for the design of the NESSI system. You should expect to put a few hours' extra work outside your tutorials into developing and extending the work you are expected to do in your tutorials. The activities are cumulative: doing a good job on earlier parts is essential for being able to do a good job on later parts. Although the task in itself is quite simple, it will gain from the work you do in tutorials to develop your understanding of the problem.

This assignment is not intended to be a huge amount of work, either to do or to mark, and in particular it shouldn't involve putting much effort into presenting the work. The idea is to encourage and reward you for having a determined go at the seminaractivities and achieving their educational objectives.

Scenario

Your firm of interaction design consultants has been hired by a large British retail company aiming to become a major player in online shopping. It sees the key to success as being able to offer something that Amazon can't, and that also isn't being offered by manufacturers, name brands and specialist retailers whose websites simply display all the items they have in a particular category, like t-shirts or size 13 shoes. The large retail company has asked your interaction design consultancy to develop a novel kind of ecommerce interface as a concept demonstrator prototype that its development team can implement. The project is codenamed the Novel Electronic Shopping System Interface, or NESSI.

Crucial for success is a user experience that is both efficient and pleasant. Being able to find particular products efficiently by naming or describing them is essential, but this is something that most ecommerce systems are already quite good at. The system should also enable people to engage in the kind of exploratory shopping that they can in physical stores, by looking at products within a particular broad or more specific category or related to the product they are looking at, so they might be more willing to impulse buy, without being either swamped or restricted to a small product range. A mechanism for doing this might use the organization of a physical shop as an inspiration or as an interface metaphor, or it might work completely differently. The clients are open to suggestions. Humans are very good at visual search in environments like department stores, so enabling better visual search might be one approach. But it's worth thinking about how else you might want to explore or encounter shopping ideas. How might users find the right combinations of products for their needs or desires, as well as single products they came looking for, and products they find meet desires they didn't know they had.

Your task is to prepare a preliminary design for the NESSI interface, to present at a meeting. To begin, you should make a clear choice about what hardware platform you are designing the system for.

Part One: Functionality

This is based on the Seminar Activity for Week 2. The activity sheet for the Week 2 Seminar tells you what to do in detail.However you may benefit from revisiting this with the benefit of the increased understanding of the problem you have developed from later Seminar Activities.

For the assignment, the group should

- Produce a list of the functions that the NESSI system will provide, and a use case diagram for the use cases that the system will support. You should also list the features and operations that are important to what the system does but aren't use cases or functions.

The list of functions doesn't need to include descriptions of how the functions will work, but thinking about what the interactions will involve will help with working out what functions are needed as well as with the rest of the assignment.

Part Two: Design Sketches

This is based on the Seminar Activity for Week 3. The activity sheet for the Week 3 Seminar tells you what to do in detail. However you may gain from doing this again (but quickly) after learning more about the scenario through your later Seminar Activities.

For the assignment, each member of the group should

- Produce a set of idea exploration sketches for theNESSI interface, to map out the implications of one set of design choices. These should be quick, rough, cost-effective low-effort drawings. (This is the wrong place for putting effort into neatness.)

It will help to do this separately so that you explore different ideas, then discuss how well your different ideas work. However if might help if you have a preliminary discussion about how you can make major choices differently, so you can explore different possibilities. The idea is that you should be unafraid to explore by sketching, and not put too much effort into ideas at this stage to be unhappy about giving them up. What you should be putting some effort into is trying to think about how the interactions will work. Remember that the usability problems are in the details. You don't need annotations, or not many, but if you show sequences of screen states, it would be helpful to name the use case.

Assignment Two

Usability Evaluation of an Interactive System

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.

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, a prototyping plan 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
1. Choosing an interactive system to study.
2. 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.)
3. 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.
4. Consider what prototyping techniques could be used to obtain which information about the usability of a system of exactly this type, before development of a release-quality version, and what would be cost-effective to do.
5. Choosing an evaluation methodology. You should apply a standard evaluation methodology such as user testing, cognitive walkthrough, or heuristic evaluation. (If you want to do something non-standard, ask advice from your tutor.)
6. 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.
7. 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.)
8. 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.

Attachment:- Interaction Design.rar