Project

Summary: Describes motivation and guidelines for the project.

Contents: 

• Overview
• Sites

Overview

My goal for the project is to give you experience working in a team on a larger design project and see better see how the parts of the process fit together. Your goal will be to evaluate and redesign some part of an existing web site to better serve its users. 

You will work in teams of 3-4 on the project, mainly during the last half of the semester. 

For most teams, the project will have four major deliverables:

• A project proposal, in which you will identify the site, users, and tasks of concern. [40 points]
• A report on your evaluation of the existing site. [40 points]
• A redesign of the site, with accompanying design rationale. [40 points]
• A poster which you will present at a public poster session on the last day of class. [50 points]

As part of this process, you will also produce other artifacts, such as:

• A proposal for the participation of human subjects in usability evaluation.
• Spreadsheets of findings from heuristic evaluation and usability studies of the site.

To help break the project down into smaller chunks, these other artifacts will be turned in or demonstrated, but they will not be formally graded. An additional 30 points will depend on whether these artifacts are completed in a timely fashion, for a total of 200 points.

Due dates for deliverables and other artifacts can be found on the course schedule.

Sites

Projects will focus on the evaluation and design of an existing web site or tool. Designing a site from scratch is outside the scope of the assignment.

Students are welcome to propose particular sites for evaluation. However, I am particularly interested in seeing work on the following sites.

• Grinnell College Libraries (contact: Richard Fyffe, Librarian of the College)
• CS Department site (contact: John Stone, administrator)
• The writing lab (contact: Judy Hunter)
• Carbonfund.org (contact: Janet Davis)

• TC wiki - C.M. Lubinski
• PioneerWeb - Nathan Levin
• Grinnell college front door - Shitanshu Aggarwal

Janet Davis (davisjan@cs.grinnell.edu)