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Design Project Proposal 1. Statement of Problem The ability of end users to fully participate in the design and implementation of systems that can have a significant impact on their productive capacity is limited by a variety of social and technical constraints. With respect to social constraints, traditional roles on software projects have created the notion of client and developer roles that typically have resulted in at best, participatory design roles for end users and in worst case, in an adversarial situation. Neither typically leads to optimally designed product, and in many instances the end product is significantly lacking in both features and functionality for the end user community. This results in dissatisfaction with the process but leads to no clear methods to address the issue. From a technical perspective, there is a dearth of tools that promote and foster the practice of end user design. In a world where development resources are constrained, end users frequently are available to fill these resource voids, provided that appropriate tools exist to enable them to apply their domain knowledge while ensuring that software development processes are adhered to by the correct application of the tools and appropriate software development controls that will support them in an end user design environment. The goal of our project is to apply knowledge from our research about End User Design into the “project builder” used in the L3D lab. The “project builder” is a component of L3d project “Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory”. The main purpose of Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory project is provide a framework for encouraging collaboration and uncovering new knowledge, perspectives and insights into real world problems through the use of computer simulations and dynamic information spaces for the support of collaborative learning and design. The “project builder” component is meant to let the users create their own simulations. While some example simulations are stored in the project server, the user interface of “project builder” is not user friendly enough for the end users to create their own simulations without significant mentoring. Ideally, we would like to work on the design of an interface or wizard-like tool to provide a user interface which aids End Users in creating their own simulations without the need for significant intervention by the data administrator or programmers. Our project goal is to explore modifications to the existing user interface of “project builder” by applying the principle of End User Design as discussed in class and expanded upon by our independent research into the subject. We would like to explore the design of an easier to use (user’s perspective), error preventative, informative and motivated user interface for end users in the project builder component. 2. Rationale Our team is interested in design issues, and we have been introduced to the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory project several times in this and other classes. We believe that it would be interesting to participate in this project to design an interface that can satisfy different users with different computer backgrounds. In our past design experience, we expect our users to have some common computer knowledge in order to use our product. In this project we anticipate the need to motivate and help users to use the project builder more fully as part of the design process. We anticipate the need to meet representative requirements of current users but also, to explore a general interface that can be applied beyond current project builder problem spaces. We hope that existing End User Design tools and thought can provide insights into a solution to this problem. By creating a general tool for the user to shape the software application, we hope to make it more appealing as a tool that can be leveraged in other problem domains, perhaps ones where the primary user audience might be less computer literate, as we believe is the intent of the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory project. We view this project will be a good opportunity for us to explore a less well defined problem space than we might have encountered on past projects, and, hopefully that will both challenge us and extend the learning process for our team. We anticipate spending significant time in determining what design makes sense to different level of users. From preliminary research this appears to be one of the challenges in building end user design design tools. In summary, we believe that this will be a good avenue for exploring the challenges incumbent in end user design tool creation and problem formulation, and will supplement our initial research work. 3.Implementation 3.1 Technical Details We currently envision this as a implementation project, rather than as a purely conceptual one. While we may not be able to create a functioning interface in the allotted time , our intent is to, at a minimum, construct a mock up prototype for the interface as a deliverable. If time allows we will try to incorporate the deliverable into the project builder product. The tools used will be those of the product and/or tools with which we might fashion an acceptable prototype such as photoshop, flash, java, and dreamweaver. We have considered a wizard-like interface to guide the user through the process of designing his/her simulation. The concept of kitchen design critiquing software we discussed in the class might be a good example for us to explore in considering how best to implement the interface. 3.2 Implementation Plan Over the two weeks, we will begin the design of our application as well as meeting with known users. We will begin development using tools discussed above to prototype our design. From there we will decide how best to implement the final design for class (whether in the product or in some other suitable tools). During the process we will be meeting with Hal Eden for advice and input as to our progress and any issues that may arise. Pro Forma Implementation Plan
4. References Ernesto G. Arias, Hal Eden, Gerhard Fischer, Andy Gorman, “Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory”, http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/systems/EDC/, Ernesto Arias, Hal Eden, Gerhard Fischer, Andrew Gorman, and Eric Scharff, “Transcending the individual human mind—creating shared understanding through collaborative design”, http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/tochi2000.pdf Fischer, G., Nakakoji, K., Ostwald, J., Stahl, G., & Sumner, T. (1998) "Embed¬ding Critics in Design Environments." In M. T. Maybury & W. Wahlster (Eds.), Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, pp 537-561.http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/embedded-critics-98.pdf Also see independent research page for list of references. Back
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