ABET Program Certification
HCI 551 Project 2

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In contrast to the initially proposed timeline of the project, the evaluation of this project took place in two phases. The first phase entailed a thorough investigation of the principles of information interaction that have been proposed by the project stakeholders. This was very essential, as it immediately influences the implementation of the interfaces; this project requires a complex interaction of the mappings between different information items, such as ABET Performance Indicators, Software Engineering Program Objectives, Courses, and Students. Performance Indicators are in a many-to-many relationship with Program Objectives, meaning that one or more Program Objectives are fulfilling one or more Performance Indicators. Furthermore, Program Objectives are in a similar relationship with Courses, with the difference that Program Objectives are by proxy in a many-to-many relationship with Students. Every Student is enrolled in at least one Course, thereby being in a relationship with Program Objectives that are fulfilled by one or more Courses. The thereby instantiated relationship graph is hence of a complex, circular, bi-directionally feeding nature. Every node on that graph (which is an information item such as a Performance Indicator or a Course) stands in a many-to-many relationship with other nodes. This interaction of the information nodes was modeled by the project stakeholders, namely by the faculty of the Computer Science department of SUNY Oswego. The aim was to propose a visualization of the interaction such that it is easy to understand and modify without extensive knowledge of graph theory.

The second phase of evaluation was concerned with the evaluation of the interface prototypes. Since the prototypes seek to visualize the information in the most efficient manner, the measurement of efficiency is immediately dependent on the way the information is structured. The first phase has established the interaction concept, so that the second phase concentrates on how this interaction is implemented. This project proposes two different prototypes that are technologically different, in such that they employ different Java-based technologies – an Applet and a GWT Web Application. Both technologies have different possibilities and limitations to implement the certification tracking interface that is called for in this project and hence are conceptually different. Phase two therefore aims at usability and understandability of the interface alternatives; as the usability of the information interaction scheme has already been evaluated in the first phase.

It can be seen from the proposed timeline, that the evaluation phase was somewhat truncated than initially conceived. As this project was also very implementation heavy, the evaluation had to be adjusted to entail a more thorough analysis of interface features. Therefore, the submitting authors decided to focus the evaluation on the interaction scheme of the information items and the prototypes' ability to address this scheme and present relational data. Furthermore, due to research scheduling conflicts, the eye tracking device was not available for student use in such an extensive manner that late in the project. Therefore, it was decided to deepen the analysis of interface components on the basis of structured interviews and contextual inquiries, rather than eye tracking studies since the results were expected to be identical.