In-Class Activity #5:
Establishing Requirements

Overview and Learning Objectives

This in-class activity is intended to give you and your project group an opportunity to start thinking about the design of the software you'll be developing within the group project. In particular, it will help you to develop a focused preliminary data gathering plan, as well as some preliminary user profiles, scenarios, and requirements. The specific learning objectives of this in-class collaborative activity are:

• to practice choosing data gathering activities appropriate to a specific design situation;
• to practice developing user profiles; and
• to practice formulating preliminary requirements.

Steps

Note: This activity is intended to help your project group get started with the "design document" phase of the project. Therefore, you must work on this activity with the same people with whom you are working on the course project.

1. Develop problem statement. Take 20 minutes to develop a concise (one sentence) problem statement that defines the objectives of your user-centered design project. This problem statement will both help you to focus on the goals of your project, and help you to explain your project to your classmates. Your problem statement must take the following form (see p. 17 of Newman & Lamming, Interactive System Design, Addison Wesley, 1995):
   
   
   
   This problem statement should appear prominently at the top of the document your group creates. Please show it to the instructor for approval prior to moving on to the next step.
   

2. Develop user profiles. Who do you envision the users of your software will be? Take 20 minutes to develop detailed user profiles for the key classes of users who you anticipate will use your system. Your profiles should include such things as level of computer experience, academic background, and any other personal details that you feel will be relevant. You are encouraged to express your user profiles as "personas" —archetypal users (e.g., "Joe the corporate executive") with various key traits.

3. Create data gathering plan. Based on (a) what you have learned about the various data gathering techiniques (interviews, questionnaires, naturalistic observation, contextual inquiry, and focus groups), and (b) the specific "situation of concern" (Newman & Lamming, 1995) for which you are designing a software solution, take 20 minutes to develop a preliminary data gathering plan that consists of the application of at least two different data gathering techniques. For each technique you choose, briefly describe
   • who your informants will be,
   • through what medium you will admister the technique,
   • if not using the internet, where you will apply the technique,
   • why you feel it is an appropriate technique for gathering data in your specific situation, and

   • a preliminary list of questions and/or a preliminary protocol for applying the technique.
     

4. Pick a "scribe" to keep track of the group's discussions, and to summarize the groups' answers to each question.

5. Roughly 15 minutes before the end of the class period, the instructor will randomly pick groups to come up to the front of the class to present their results for feedback and discussion.

Assignment Option #5

Note: As stated in the course syllabus, you are required to hand in at least three assignment options, one from each of the three major sections of the course (Background and Theory, Designing Interactive Systems, Evaluating Interactive Systems). In other words you need to hand in

1. assignment option #1, 2, 3, or 4;
2. assignment option #5, 6, or 7; and
3. assignment option #8

Assignment Tasks

Suppose that you are a product usability engineer at Honeywell charged with the task of designing a next-generation ENERGY STAR-compliant programmable thermostat. According to the the U.S. government's ENERGY STAR website, an ENERGY STAR- compliant thermostat must minimally meet the following three functional requirements:

1. The user must be able to set the temperature for at least two different programming periods (weekday and weekend).
2. The user must be able to set at least four different temperature settings (i.e., wake, day, evening, and sleep) within each programming period.
3. The user must be able to temporarily override the program for an unspecified period without deleting previously-programmed settings.

 

Notably, because their main goal is to promote energy conservation, the ENERGY STAR requirements say little about acceptable levels of user performance and user experience, other than the following terse warning that "the customer [must] be able to change the settings on the programmable thermostat with little difficulty." This observation raises an interesting design question:

If we grant usability and user experience as much importance as energy savings, what sort of usability, and user experience requirements emerge?

In this assignment, you will sketch out how you might address this question by completing the three steps you completed within the context of the in-class studio activity. In particular, you should (a) develop a problem statement, (b) develop a set of user profiles (personas), and (c) develop a data gathering plan, just as described in the "Steps" section above.

Additional Research Task for Graduate Students

Read the paper entitled "Rapid ethnography: time deepening strategies for HCI field research" by D. Millen. It is available on-line at http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/proceedings/chi/347642/p280-millen/p280-millen.pdf. (Make sure you're inside the WSU firewall before accessing this document; otherwise, you will not have access to the full PDF of the article.) This article considers the adaptation of ethnographic field techniques to human-computer interaction design research.

Prepare a two page (double-spaced, 1" margins) critical review of the article. Your critical review should not only identify the key points of the material, but also analyze and critique its underlying perspective. The following list of questions provides a useful starting point for your critical review:

• Who are the authors? What is their academic history? From what intellectual perspective are they coming? What are their biases?
• What are the key points of the article?
• Are there any gaps in logic or presentation? How could the presentation or argument of the article be improved?
• How does the article compare, and fit in, to others you've read on this topic (if any)?
• What do you like about the article? What do you not like? Why?

Deliverables and Grading

By the deadline, hand in a hardcopy written report that includes a section that addresses each of the assignment tasks described above. Your report must have a title page with "Assignment Option #3" displayed prominently in bold at the center of the page; your name, the name of this course, and the date should appear in smaller type below the title.

We will use this assessment form to evaluate your work. The critical review required of graduate students will be evaluated according to this assessment form. Be sure you that carefully read these forms ahead of time, so that you can take the assessment framework into account as you write your report.