IMAT 3712 Human Computer Interaction Assignment One

KitHome System Portfolio

Deadline: 12:00 Friday 17 January 2025 (Week 16)

Learning Outcomes

This assignment is designed to get you to practise and develop your skills in applying a user-centred approach to designing an interactive system, analysing requirements, and thinking through the ethical issues involved in the development projects you participate in, and to practice and develop your skills in planning, sketching and storyboarding user interface designs.

It assesses module learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4.

1. Be able to apply key general principles of usability, and a comprehensive understanding of different aspects of user experience, both to guide effective design and to evaluate existing systems.

2. Be able to apply a user centred approach to the design of an interactive system, employing appropriate prototyping techniques.

3. Be able to specify requirements for and 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.

4. Be able to investigate and analyse ethical issues involved in the design or use of an interactive system, drawing on theoretical and practical knowledge of computer ethics.

5. Be able to undertake a sophisticated analysis and appraisal of the suitability of a range of different techniques for evaluating the usability of interactive systems for particular systems, situations and purposes, and apply the evaluation techniques to produce usability evaluations.

Submission and Marking Procedure

This is a group assignment. You should work in groups of three to five; assignments submitted by larger groups will not be accepted. You may work individually, but talking to each other and getting feedback from your colleagues is meant to be part of the educational experience.

The assignment is worth 40% of the total mark for the module. The mark for each part of the assignment will be out of 25, so the total mark for the assignment as a whole will be out of 100.

The assignment will be marked by reading the report.

Submission

Each group should create a PDF by scanning sketches and other pieces of paper, and submit this to Turnitin via LearningZone. We want one submission per group. Make sure each page or contribution is labelled with its author’s pNumber as appropriate.

The deadline is 12:00 on Friday 17 January 2025. The target date for the completion of marking and the return of results is Monday 10 February 2025 (Week 20).

You should give your group a name. You should send an email to your tutor with the names and p-numbers of all the members of the group, and the name of your group, after you have done the work.

Writing

The assignment should be written entirely by you and should give a true reflection of your competence in English. It needs to be written in clear, comprehensible English; assignments in murky or unintelligible English with misused words will get fail marks.

Getting any human or machine help with producing your assignments that you have not clearly and honestly acknowledged is serious academic misconduct; this will result in severe penalties that can include expulsion from the university. So is plagiarism: using text, ideas or information from other sources that you have not honestly, clearly and accurately cited. Copying other people’s text by paraphrasing it sentence by sentence constitutes plagiarism; do not do this.

Fabrication of results (claiming to have collected data or experimental results that you haven’t collected, or are different from what you collected) is also very serious academic misconduct.

If you need help with producing assignments written in good English, you can get help, but you need to (1) detail exactly what the help was and who or what provided it, and (2) provide copies of your original versions of texts, so we can evaluate exactly what is yours and what isn’t, so we can arrive at fair marks. Using Grammarly in its standard mode (provided by the free version) to find and correct grammar mistakes is allowed, but using the Grammarly AI feature (in the paid version) to improve your work constitutes cheating.

If you are in doubt about what to do, you should consult your tutor.

The KitHome System Scenario

As well as lectures, the module has ‘seminars’ and ‘practicals’ in which we want you to develop your skills and understanding by applying what you’ve learned. The seminars comprise a connected sequence of activities based on a single scenario, doing different parts of the development process for the KitHome system. The activities are cumulative: doing a good job on earlier parts is essential for being able to do a good job on later parts. The portfolio assignment is based on the work you are expected to do in your seminars, developing ideas for the design of the KitHome 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.

Scenario

Your firm of interaction design consultants has been hired by Demon Fort Construction PLC to design an interface to the KitHome system. This is a tool running on a computer (perhaps a tablet) that is intended to facilitate the process through which Demon Fort Construction’s customers design their own houses.

Demon Fort Construction PLC is a large British building company with its headquarters in Leicester, that specialises in building housing estates. Demon Fort Construction is abandoning traditional housebuilding methods, and introducing a new system in which, after the foundations have been prepared, houses are constructed rapidly on-site from prefabricated components that meet modern standards for energy efficiency and sustainability. The use of prefabricated components allows a limited degree of customization, so that houses can be designed to fit the idiosyncrasies of the site and the desires of the customers, by putting together available components in different ways.

The KitHome system is intended to provide people buying new houses with a way to explore the different possibilities they have for the design of their new houses, by adding and swapping components. It should also enable them to see the appearance of the building and envision the consequences of their design choices, as well as the effects they have on the ultimate price.

The Tasks

The assignment comprises four separate tasks. The work involved in each task should be divided among the members of the team. You should each label the parts you were primarily responsible for as your work. However the assignment should be treated as teamwork: You should discuss the assignment and develop ideas together, and give each other feedback.

Part One: Requirements

The first part of the development process is working out what you’re trying to achieve. As a group, you need to produce a requirements specification for the KitHome system. While an initial requirements specification wouldn’t be cast in concrete, you would need to do a thorough job of this at the beginning of any development project. Part One of the Assignment is to produce the following:

1. A set of functional requirements, describing what the system needs to be able to do or enable the users to do. The functional requirements do not need to be complete, but you should make an effort to be thorough in considering what functionality the system needs and be specific and precise, so that compliance could be tested.

You should agree a division of labour between the members of the team, so that each member takes primary responsibility for one or more areas of functionality, and will be marked on that subset of the functional requirements. The division of the functional requirements and who is responsible for what needs to be clearly marked in your submission.

2. A set of non-functional requirements, describing how or how well the system needs to operate. As well as constraints the system needs to meet, non-functional requirements include such things as performance and service level requirements, access and security requirements, failure recovery requirements, and archiving requirements. (Leave out usability requirements here.) The non-functional requirements do not need to be complete, but you should make an effort to consider what the non-functional requirements should be. These need be specific and precise, so that compliance could be tested. Promises of good intentions are not good enough; you need targets. (Foolish targets are at least useful for stimulating debate about what they really should be, so better than none.)

You should agree a division of labour between the members of the team, so that each member takes primary responsibility for one or more types of non-functional requirement, and will be marked on that subset of the non-functional requirements. The division of the non-functional requirements and who is responsible for what needs to be clearly marked in your submission.

3. A set of usability requirements, describing how or how well the interaction between the user and the system should work. The usability requirements should state the aspect of usability that should be good or right, how it will be measured, the subset of users the requirement applies to, the preconditions for making the measurements, and the attainment criteria: target level, best possible level, worst acceptable level, and the now level.

You should make an effort to think of some specific aspects of usability that are important for particular tasks, as what matters may be very different for different use cases or functions. Each member of the teams needs to state two usability requirements; these need to be clearly labelled with who is responsible for them.

If you wish you may include a Use Case Diagram.

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: Users

You need to consider who your potential users of the KitHome system might be, and how their needs might differ.

Part Two of the Assignment is to produce the following:

1. A list of potential personas you might develop. Each ‘potential persona’ should take the form. of a name and a brief two or three sentence description, identifying the character’s role vis-à-vis the system and the organization, and what needs or characteristics make that character distinctive. The idea is to get you think as broadly and imaginatively as possible about what the system’s users might be like, before developing personas to represent segments of your user population.

2. A set of personas describing fictional characters who represent segments of the user population, with name, biographical information, personality and interests and idiosyncrasies, as well as reasons and purposes for using the system.

Each member of the team should create two personas, one of which should represent an actual or potential house buyer, and one of which should represent an unusual or non-obvious segment of the user population. Each persona should be clearly labelled by who is responsible for it. While the team members will be marked on their own personas, the team will get credit for aiming for a wide and persuasive spread of user characteristics.

Part Three: Legal and Ethical Analysis

You need to consider the nature of the development process, what is involved in doing it well, and what the potential uses and abuses of the system are. You should aim to achieve a design that is based on being sensitive to values as well as compliant with the law, whether or not you apply Value Sensitive Design as a systematic methodology.

When creating systems or doing any kind of development work that involves data, protecting that data and considering the privacy of personal information is of vital importance. You should therefore be aware of GDPR principles. Details of obligations under data protection legislation and lots of resources on this topic can be found at the Information Commissioner's website. https://ico.org.uk/ When creating systems or doing any kind of development work that involves providing products or software or services to users, you need to consider your moral and legal obligations to avoid bias and discrimination against people with disabilities, and comply with the Equality Act 2010.

Part Three of the Assignment is to produce the following:

1. A list of potential legal issues, ethical issues and value concerns. These should be described as briefly as possible while conveying what the issue is, typically in one sentence. The idea is to get you to think as broadly and imaginatively as possible about what issues to do with the ethical conduct and professionalism of developers and other team members, the ethical implications of the system, and stakeholder values might need more serious consideration.

2. A set of analyses of ethical and values issues. The most significant ethical and values issues affecting the development of the KitHome system should be analysed in detail, with an analysis of what the issue is, and how it relates to the particular characteristics of the KitHome system, what ethical principles should be used to think about it and decide what to do, how it might affect KitHome stakeholders, and how you can try to elicit stakeholder views, as well as an assessment of how much of a problem is likely to be for the KitHome system or its development process in practice.

Each member of the team should produce analyses of two ethical or values issues. Each analysis should be clearly labelled with who produced it. While the team members will be marked on their own ethical analyses, the team will get credit for aiming for a wide and persuasive spread of issues.

Part Four: Design Sketches

An essential part of interactive system development is exploring ideas about how the system might work – both what it will look like (at different points, and when being used for different tasks), and how users will interact with it. Sketching is an extremely effective way to explore design ideas; for this the drawings don’t need to be ‘good’ – just good enough to convey the information you currently need and answer the questions you currently have. 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. Drawings intended to impress people might need to be a lot prettier, but what we want to see here is sketching for design, not sketching to show off what’s already designed.

Part Four of the Assignment is to produce the following:

1. A set of design sketches showing a potential design for the customer user interface of the KitHome system. These should 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. However, you should think about how the interaction sequences required to do important user tasks are going to work; and you should think about how much detail and neatness you need to get answers to your current set of questions about your design ideas.

Each member of the team should produce one set of sketches. Make sure every sketch is labelled with your pNumber. While the team members will be marked on their own sets of sketches, it might help to have a preliminary discussion about how you can make major choices differently, so you can explore different possibilities.

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. We expect you to hand-draw your design sketches with pen or pencil, and then scan them or photograph them. While you may use a wireframing tool or computer drawing package if you insist, we want to discourage this unless you really are disabled or clinically dyspraxic, as the fluency of hand-drawing is what you need for exploring ideas.

One issue to keep in mind is how much information the different elements of your screen designs should show, and how much space they will need to accommodate it. Remember that the usability problems are in the details.