User Interface Design: Prototyping

In this project, my team will implement a detailed mobile-based prototype of our interface. We can use any prototyping tools that we like to assist this process (e.g., Adobe XD, InVision, Framer, Sketch, etc.). We would be able to get much of the interface functionality working, but clearly we will not be able to implement all back-end application functionality. Additionally, we must provide a set of initial usability specifications for our system and a plan for an evaluation of it. To develop usability specifications, we would consider the objectives of our design. For example, if we are working on a calendar manager, we might specify time limits in which we expect a user to be able to schedule or modify an appointment, or a maximum number of errors that we expect to occur. Basically, we would list a set of criteria by which our interface can be evaluated. Further, this part of the project should include an initial evaluation plan for the system. What kinds of benchmark tasks would we have users perform to help evaluate the interface? What kind of subjective questions would we ask if we were to deploy our system and have a user critique the interface? We will need to actually carry out some of this evaluation in the next project, so we should do our best to set it up now. The key here is not to do some exhaustive description of a usability evaluation plan, but to motivate why the particular plan we propose is appropriate for this interface. Note that developing an initial evaluation plan is also a good way to figure out how much of the interface we need to develop. We should be able to build and connect enough of the application functionality to be able to conduct an initial usability evaluation with the benchmark tasks as we are proposing here. Our write-up for this project would include a description of our system prototype. We can include screen dumps to help explain it and text to describe how a user would interact with it. We discuss the implementation challenges we faced. Were there aspects that we wanted to build but were unable to do so? The key component to include in our project report is a justification of why we settled on the design that we chose. What's special about this particular design with respect to our problem? The report for this project also includes the usability specifications that we established and a description of the evaluation that we are planning. This need not be too detailed here as the actual evaluation will occur in the next project.