overview
Over the course of the past two year, there have been many changes in people’s
everyday lives. From the way they socialize and interact with each other, to how they
manage to go through their daily activities.
These two assignments are asking you to design an interactive system that responds to
the needs of students who are transitioning back to campus. These assignments
consist of two components that, together, will take you through one iteration of the
design and development lifecycle for an interactive product.
Self isolating and working from home was very challenging for all of us. However, most of us
tried to find some ways to work around the difficulties and live our lives, to the point that now we
might be more used to the new routines we developed at home.
Now that the campus has reopened, transitioning back from the life to which we tried to adapt in
the past two years can be challenging. In these assignments, you are asked to work in your
group and go through at least one iteration of the design process of interactive systems
to identify one of the issues of students transitioning back to campus and eventually find
a solution that can help with the daily lives of people around you in some shape or form.
At the conclusion of these components (end of assignment 2), you will have an
interactive prototype of an interactive system alongside all the associated materials
(personas, user profiles, …) that will help with the future design and development of an
interactive system. You are not expected to build a fully functional or a minimum viable
product.
PART 1 (Assignment 1 – Problem Statement/ Design Brief)
Read Chapters 2 and 11 of the textbook. In order to complete this part, you will need to
be familiar with the contents of these chapters.
In this part of the assignments, we focus on the first diamond in the double diamond
of design.
Discover and Define
In the Discover phase, we observe the people, to find out about their problems,
their goals, their concerns, their needs and requirements for coming back to
campus…
1. Use probes, contextual inquiry, or brainstorming to find out about the
problems your team and your close circle (friends, roommates (if applicable),
family members (if applicable), … ) have with coming back to campus. This can
be in the context of:
● Commuting
● Health and safety
● Wellness
● Time management
● Food and diet
● Other opportunities or problems…
Pay attention that the focus should be on the concerns that students have from going
back to the in-person form of study.
2. Document the outcome of your sessions. Through scripting or taking note of the
sessions, taking pictures of the boards of ideas, etc.
3. What are the problems or opportunities for design? What needs to be fixed? What
can be enhanced? What are the needs that cannot be addressed using the
current interactive systems. Try to find commonalities in the data you collect.
Use the techniques and suggestions explained in the book for brainstorming or
contextual inquiry and document your steps and findings.
User profiles and Personas
Based on the patterns you find in the data, develop at least two user profiles.
Develop a persona for each of these profiles with a scenario capturing how the user
is expected to interact with the product.
Establishing requirements
We will use the Volere Requirements Specification Template to structure the design
brief in this assignment. This should include a sub-section for each of Functional
and Non-Functional Requirements. The Non-Functional Requirements section should
contain sub-sub-sections for each of the following:
● Look and Feel Requirements
● Usability and Humanity Requirements
● Performance Requirements
● Operational and Environmental Requirements
● Maintainability and Support Requirements
● Security Requirements
● Cultural and Political Requirements
● Legal Requirements
Locate an on-line source of information about the Volere Requirements Specification
Template. Obtain further information about each of these. Remember: the requirements
should not be so specific as to determine the design of the interactive system. They
should provide the criteria which determine whether a particular design can be
considered or not. Many different potential designs can meet the requirements.
Use cases
Identify at least two use cases of the system. Associate the use cases with one of the
roles in the system. You are free to use any of the use case styles introduced in the
book or class.
Submission
The written report for this assignment will contain:
● An explanation of the technique used to gather data from users (alongside some
exemplary pictures or notes documented), patterns found, …
● Two user profiles
● A persona for each user profile with a scenario capturing user interaction
● Requirements
● Two use cases of the system
Marking Criteria
Soundness:
● completeness and appropriateness of requirements
● requirements do not, in a sneaky way, specify the design (design decisions and
requirements are abstracted apart)
● user profiles are distinct from one another
● distinction between user profiles and persona
● success in identifying use cases
Presentation:
caliber of the writing and quality of both written and oral presentations
PART 2 (Assignment 2)
Read Chapter 12 of the textbook. In order to complete this component, you will need to
be familiar with the contents of this chapter. In this part you need to provide a low fidelity
and a high fidelity prototype of your system. This falls under the second diamond of the
double diamond of design. A detailed specification for Assignment 2 will be
provided later on eClass