HCI 5990 CAPSTONE

Course Objective

This HCI course serves as a capstone which allows students to demonstrate their mastery of the learning outcomes found in the HCI Handbook by drawing on the HCI core curriculum.

This course consists mainly of a large system design project. The deliverables at each milestone of the project demonstrate the your ability to:

• Take a user-centered approach to design
• Draw on relevant research to analyze emerging technologies
• Clearly articulate ideas in written and oral form
• Analyze societal and ethical implications of technology

You will develop a digital system from start to prototype during this course and create a website presenting the project. The  project idea will be negotiated between us. You will follow the steps of typical product development, for which there are milestones at each deliverable point.  With each milestone, you will deliver a report on your design thinking, drawing on academic references from the relevant field in a way that demonstrates facility with the key concepts covered in HCI 521, HCI 575, and HCI 655.

There will be no regular class meeting as usual. Individual email will be the main mode of communication.

Grading will be based solely on the project milestones.

Classroom technologies will include:

• This site for information and for discussion
• Your own choice of website authoring/hosting. Weebly or Google Sites is good for easy clean-looking sites.
• Skype or uploaded videos (optional)

 

The Design Project

The goal of this project is to design, prototype, and test an interactive system that solves a problem of significance to a group of users. At some point you need to have a digital prototype, you need to work with users, and at the end you need to build a website presenting your project.

Yes, that’s fine, but we’ll need to negotiate what the project is to ensure that it gives you opportunity to complete the milestones and their accompanied analysis rather than, say, wrapping analytical text around something you did previously.

We can do it, but it adds difficulty. The idea of a land grant educational institution like Iowa State is to create new knowledge that we can disseminate publicly. That said, I know some of you will want to do a project related to your workplace, which makes sense because you can get the work done and by doing it in a somewhat more reflective way than you might normally in a workplace, you can get credit for this course also. 

If you want to do something more private, please let the instructor know as soon as possible. 

There is no danger of your losing any intellectual property (IP) during this project. You are a student and are not getting paid by ISU, so ISU will not claim any IP from you. 

Sure; we’d all be impressed. As long as you satisfy the course requirements, that’s fine.

Yes, though you have to each give a separate defense (presentation) of your capstone work. So, if you are on a coordinated group project, it needs to be very clear what your contribution is. This needs to be more clear than a typical class project where one person does the lit review and one person writes up the rest, etc. Working as a group is not a way to do less work. Working as a group IS a way to have more impact on a challenge because you can combine your talents. That’s why we call it “coordinated.” If there are 3 members of the group, there are really 3 separate projects that are coordinated. 

Examples: 

• FAIL: The group decides to build an app together to help people manage their trackers when they own both Apple AirTags and Tiles. One person does user needs discovery, one person does UI design, and another person does user testing. Wrong. This is a fail because each person needs to do at least some of each step. 
• SUCCESS:  The group decides to build a website that encourages lifelong learning, but realizes there are 3 primary customer types: retired older adults, mid-career adults who want reskilling, and stay-at-home parents who want to continue learning and keep up career skills while at home. The group does some customer discovery interviews together, perhaps with a focus group, but each person pays attention to a different customer group. Then each person designs features of the website for their customers, and does user testing with their customers. However, the members work together to make sure the website is coherent for all 3. When each student presents, they focus on user stories involving their group and credits other students for their portions of the work. 

At a minimum, to ensure you each do at least some of each step, the requirements are:

• M2: you must each lead at least one of the three interviews. you must each participate in the analysis.
• M3: you must each do part of the ideation / sketching of the interface. If you are creating designs for more than one task, you could each lead the design for one of the tasks. If you are focusing on one task, you could split it into parts and each lead one part of it; e.g. one person does the sign up flow and welcome screen / home screen, one person does the task flow.
• M4: you must each create part of the prototype. similar to M3, split it either by task, or by part of the task.
• M5: you must each lead the evaluation with at least two of your six users. If doing a focus group, you must lead at least a half or a third of the focus group session (depending on if in a group of 2 or 3). you must each participate in analysis.
• You will give an oral presentation of your work
• You will create a single deliverable of all of your work for the ISU Digital Repository.