Assignment 2: Mini Design - Auditory User Interface

Due date: See class schedule

Assignment Objectives

In order to study the effects of different designs on how humans interact with computers, you must be able to come up with different interaction designs. Therefore, being able to come up with a creative and effective design for a system is an essential part of the required skill set for HCI professionals. This homework will allow you to explore that area, and demonstrate your individual design skills (remembering that design is a different skill than being able to implement pretty interfaces!). This clearly requires creativity, but it also requires an understanding of the principles and guidelines for usability that have been covered in the course and readings. Not everyone is as bursting with ideas. Not everyone feels she or he has drawing or aesthetic or so-called creativity skills. If you think you are lacking in these areas, well, they can only get better with practice! Here's your chance to practice in a situation where you have everything to gain and nearly nothing to lose. Applying the systematic design process and usability principles you now know, can overcome a lot of supposed "lack of creativity". You just might surprise yourself.

Designing a Prototype Interface

You and your teammate will design, layout, and mockup an auditory user interface. You will identify a context, then determine a class of users, and a task/need for those users. This will all be in the realm of an auditory interaction. Then you will list design constraints and considerations, assess the types of information that needs to be communicated to/from the user/system...then layout the interaction model. You will want to use storyboards, flowcharts, or other methods of representing the interaction. Finally, you will actually prototype the interaction and test it with users.

You will decide exactly what "auditory user interface" means. It can involve speech-based input (by the user), non-speech input; speech and/or non-speech output (from the system).

Your (prototype) system design might be simple or complex, in fact it could be hopelessly difficult or impossible to actually implement, because you are not going to implement it as a true standalone system. Instead you are going to be making a "mock-up" prototype.

You can use whatever tools you wish to prototype. You might use Powerpoint, figma, sketch, physical paper, or any other tools to provide a mockup interface. The core idea behind such a paper-prototype is that you can sketch out the core interactions, provide visual and audio feedback for test users, but not implement any of the actual core logic or system building prematurely before you have done the user research to ensure the system is even doing the right thing. Instead you are the computer and will walk users along through the mockup, reacting to their inputs and presenting them with the corresponding design outputs.

Testing with users

Once you have a design and mock-up prototype, you can begin user testing. You will conduct an observational study, where at least three different users are presented with the prototype. While one team member "runs" the prototype, the other member(s) should take notes on what decisions the user makes and at what times (recording may be helpful). You should be able to map each "user-story" through your designed interaction model. Take particular notes of when the user is stuck, confused, or does something different than you expected. Use these notes to reconstruct the user's mental model of the system and compare it to your design.

Analyze user data to formulate future work

Early stage prototyping and observational research like this is essential in the early stages of design, as well as in researching new user-contexts. One of the key skills in this work is translating early stage observational insights into the more formal constructions needed to do experimental studies. Using your user study notes, formulate a hypothesis explanation for the different user responses you found, as well as two possible alterations to your design that could be experimentally compared. Formulate a concrete research question and experimental procedure to test your hypothesis.

Deliverables

Your team will submit one report (just one of you needs to upload it to gradescope, make sure that after submitting the whole team is added to the group submission). The report should contain 3 sections:

1. A section that describes the context, user, tasks, requirements, information architecture, and interaction flow. Add any information that helps to explain what you have designed. Also talk about how you have prototyped the interaction. What tools did you use? What went well? What were the challenges?
2. A section outlining the findings of your prototype user study. Describe the number of participants, how long did each participant interact with the prototype? What did each participant do the same? What did each do differently? What were the notable difficulties users found? How did mental models differ and agree?
3. A section describing your synthesized insights from the user study, as well as your hypothesized explanations, comparable design alterations, and experimental proposal.