OCAD+-+Assignement+1

= - OCAD Assignement 1 - =

**Important Dates**
- Presentation: November, 9 - Report: November, 16

Credit
Presentation: 20% Report: 30%

Coordination
6 designers attend the class, making 3 groups for the assignment. Please throw your ideas / join a partner on this page.

**Context**
The design of high-quality user interfaces is earned by providing quality features such as usability, universality, and usefulness. In this process, the designer usually begins by 1) determining user needs, 2) defining the design space, 3) generating multiple design alternatives, 4) illustrating design ideas through use case scenarios and 4) conducting extensive evaluation.

All these steps are crucial for the design of a successful user interface, whether it is a desktop application, a touch-based interface, or even a new physical device.

**Project goal**
Each group of 2 designers is asked to pick a theme and study/design what would be the ideal sketch-based interface solution, with regards to the critera mentioned above. Each group will conduct research, write a document about the sketch-based interface (or device) of their dreams, and give a presentation of about 40 minutes to the class. You can make the problem more tractable (and it is preferable) by narrowing the scope of what your interface or device does.

Good examples would be: painting landscapes to create 3D terrains; sketch-based interface to controlling music on your iPod; sketching to design functional objects like cellphones that can flip or slide open, cars with doors that open or wheels that roll; posing 3D human figures from gesture sketches; file mark-up and browsing using sketching.

On the contrary, overly broad examples would be: turning any given 2D sketch into a 3D object; controlling my computer by sketching – and overly narrow examples would be: designing 3D easter eggs by sketching; sketching to control the volume on a device.

**Presentation**
Each group will present their work in class (40min of presentation / critique).

**Delivrable: report**
The students are asked to write a research report
 * Format**: we leave the final document's format open. The content of your report, however, should be equivalent to a regular 8-12 pages Word document.
 * Content / evaluation criteria**: the final document should contain the following elements:


 * related work (what has been done in this area?)
 * the UIST, CHI, SIGGRAPH, DIS conference proceedings, youtube and design forums are a good start to look up what exists
 * user needs
 * task taxonomy: what are the tasks that the interface / device should support
 * needs and constraints: for a new device, for example, what are the physical constraints to be taken into account; for a desktop interface, are there any specific needs such as light-weight media, tactile device, etc. Are there any other specific aspects to be considered (collaboration,…)
 * design space
 * what are the different design options possible: for example, a technique could be addressed using different technologies, such as a desktop interface, a tablet, or a new physical device. In this case, what are the constraints / advantages of each; given a specific technology, what are the different approaches to address the tasks
 * design requirements
 * based on the knowledge gained through related work review, expert user feedback (if it applies) and design space study, what are the design requirements for an ideal interface
 * user interface prototype
 * sketches, paper protoype, etc... to illustrate your ideal interface / device
 * a complete desktop-based interface sketch is not necessarily the best option here; for example, a collection of individual interaction / presentation techniques based on the task taxonomy, although not embedded in a system interface are also relevant
 * use case scenarios
 * the usability / usefulness of the interface should be illustrated through use case scenarios
 * evaluation
 * the group should provide some thoughts on how the interface could be evaluated, if it happened it came to the stage of prototype

The following list of readings are examples of technical research publications containing one or more of the above components. Although these pieces of work should serve as an illustration, your report is not necessarily expected to take the form of a Computer Science research publication. Your documents will be evaluated based on the completeness for each criteria.

**Required readings**
Kurtenbach, G., Fitzmaurice, G., Baudel, T. & Buxton, W. [|The design and evaluation of a GUI paradigm based on tabets, two-hands, and transparency.] (**Design Requirements**, **Evaluation**)

Bezerianos, P. Dragicevic, J.-D. Fekete, J. Bae, B. Watson. [|GeneaQuilts: A System for Exploring Large Genealogies] (**Task taxonomy, Use case scenarios)**

J. Zhao, F. Chevalier and R. Balakrishnan [|Kronominer: Using Multi-Foci Navigation for the Visual Exploration of Time-Series Data] (**Task taxonomy, Design Space, Design Requirements)**

Mathieu Nancel, Julie Wagner, Emmanuel Pietriga, Olivier Chapuis, Wendy Mackay [|Mid-air Pan-and-Zoom on Wall-sized Displays]. (**Design Space)**

Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton [|Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time).] = (**Evaluation**) =

**Recommended readings and additional resources**
Information and Design: Usability resources []

Bill Buxton. Gesture-based interaction. http:// [|www.billbuxton.com/input14.Gesture.pdf]

Buxton, B. (2008). [|Surface and Tangible Computing, and the "Small" Matter of People and Design]. IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers, Vol. 51, 24-29. []