User Interface Design: Understanding the Problem

The key goal of this project is to deeply understand the problem space that I am addressing, its set of pertinent users, and the issues and constraints that are involved in the problem. If the task has an existing system/interface, I would perform an interpretive evaluation of that system to help me learn more about it. Most important is to identify important characteristics of the problem that will influence my subsequent design. I will utilize the different techniques for acquiring this kind of information that I feel are most appropriate to the particular task I am examining. My report and deliverable would deeply examine the problem of study. Who are the potential users and stakeholders? What tasks do they seek to perform? What functionality should the system provide? Basically, I am setting up a set of constraints and user requirements for my subsequent design. What criteria should be used to judge if my design is a success or not? More specifically, I would develop the following items in this project, and I would communicate them through my report:

• Motivation: An overview of the problem my team is tackling and why it's needed.
  • I would ground this in research and literature. Start to quantify how impactful the problem is on society.
  • I would leverage methods such as interviews, observations, surveys, etc to get a better idea of what problems my users are having. Use these techniques to understand what the boundaries of my problem space are.
• User definition: A description of the important characteristics of the users of the system.
  • I would ground this in research and literature. What have people already done in the research domain?
  • I can leverage methods such as interviews, observations, surveys, etc to get a better idea of my users.
• An analysis of an existing system, which can consist of:
  • Automated or manual, including its strong points and deficiencies.
  • A task analysis consisting of one of the following:
    • A description of the important characteristics of the current tasks performed by users.
    • A description of important characteristics of the current task environment.
    • A simple structured task analysis of the problem.
• A description of the larger social and technical system or context in which my design will intersect.
• An initial list of user requirements, that should be used in the eventual evaluation of my design, including a high-level description of how I could measure the successful adherence to these principles.
• A brief description and justification of how the above information was gathered.
• A discussion of the implications of what I learned above.