Summary: The goal of the poster is to present your design process as a whole to each other and to a non-expert audience.
Collaboration: Each group will submit one poster. You may discuss the poster with anyone you like. If you have any questions about what is expected or how to address a particular concern, please talk with me.
Due: Tuesday, May 6, 5 p.m.
A poster is a common means of communication both in scientific communities and design communities. You will develop a poster giving an overview of your project not only to me and other members of your class, but also non-experts (potentially including your "clients" for the project).
The poster should cover your entire project, albeit perhaps in miniature. It should distill the most important and/or interesting parts of your work at a relatively high level. You almost certainly will not have space to include all the detail from the various proposals and reports you've prepared this semester (but you should be prepared to talk about those details during the poster session.)
Because design method is not the scientific method, and your design work was at least somewhat iterative, your poster will look a bit different from the standard science poster template. However, your poster should include an abstract, introduction, conclusion, acknowlegments, and references; methods used for usability evaluation and for redesigning the site; and results, consisting of usability issues and the product of your redesign of the site.
Here is a sketch of one possible poster design:
It is customary to acknowlege your participants as well as others who contributed to the work, although I left this out of the sketch above.
Depending on the focus of your project (e.g., if you were comparing two interfaces), you may spend more space on findings from the usability evaluation, and less space on the site redesign.
If you want to see an example of an academic poster in HCI, you might look at my poster on Household Indicators. I made this poster while the work was in progress. It's adequate but not wonderful.
Use poster-template.ppt as a template for your poster. The template can be edited in Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org Impress. (Sadly, I cannot recommend Apple Keynote. It seems to have been designed for Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs alone.)
Do not alter the page setup. It is important that the poster print at the correct page size.
You can, of course, rearrange the text boxes if you wish. You can find additional instructions for editing posters under "Creating a poster using Powerpoint" on the library's page about making posters.
Be sure to save your poster as either a PowerPoint (.ppt) or PDF file. I will coordinate with Stephanie Peterson to have your poster printed for the poster session during class time on Thursday, May 8.
From a Windows machine, copy your poster to \\Storage\projects\Csc\CSC-295\Spring2008\
From the MathLAN, you can use the command-line program ftp or the graphical program gftp (or probably some other programs as well) to connect to the server ftpserver.grinnell.edu.
The poster will be worth 40 points. My criteria are:
Your presentation of the poster in class on Thursday, May 8, will be worth an additional 10 points. My criteria here will be delivery: How well does your team orally explain your findings and design, using the poster as a visual aid?
You will be asked to evaluate each other's posters using this rubric. I will use the same rubric to assign grades.
Janet Davis (davisjan@cs.grinnell.edu)
Created April 21, 2008