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GR3: Paper Prototyping

Prototype building (OPTIONAL) Wednesday, March 5th, 3-5 pm, 32-D463
Prototype testing

Due at 3:00pm on Friday, March 7th, 2008, in 26-152, until 5:00pm.

Final hand-in

Due at 5:00pm on Friday, March 14th, 2008, on the wiki.

Overview

In this group assignment, you will do your first implementation of your term project, which will be a paper prototype. Your paper prototype should be able to handle at least 3 scenarios. These scenarios will probably be the scenarios you described in GR2, unless you get feedback from us telling you to change your scenarios.

There are two class meetings associated with this assignment (days and times shown above):

Since your classmates are too much like you (they're taking 6.831, they're mostly CS students, etc., etc.), you should consider them merely pilot users, who help you find the most obvious usability problems and help you practice running your paper prototype. After Testing Day, you should find some realistic users. First, revise your paper prototype to address the critical usability problems and explore possible design alternatives. Then, test it on at least 3 users from your target population, all from outside the class.

Choosing What to Prototype and Test

You may need to adjust your scenarios so that they explore the riskiest parts of your interface. A part of your interface is risky if its usability is hard to predict, or if its usability strongly affects the usability of the whole system. For example:

Risky parts need the most design iteration, so they'll give you the most payoff from prototyping. In other words, don't waste your effort on prototyping a login screen, but do make sure to prototype a novel, complicated, frequently-used dialog box. Not every risky part can be easily tested with paper prototyping, but if you make sure your scenarios cover the risky parts now, you'll be able to plan your subsequent (computer-based) prototypes better.

Preparing for Testing Day

Before testing your prototype, you should:

Running the Tests

When you run your prototype on a user, you should do the following things:

Bring extra materials on Testing Day. Having extra blank Post-it notes, correction tape, and index cards on hand will help you improvise if a user does something unexpected, or help you make small fixes to your prototype between users.

Playing a User for Your Classmates

On Testing Day, when you are serving as a user, you should:

What to Hand In

Update your group's wiki page so that it contains a section GR3 Paper Prototyping, containing the following subsections:

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