ABET Program Certification
HCI 551 Project 2

download Project Documentation (.pdf)

Due to the fact that the ABET website has not yet been implemented a functional prototype needs to be developed from which the actual site design can be implemented. This project therefore is structured into two phases; the design phase and the evaluation phase, which will be run concurrently in a R.A.D. development cycle.

The design phase will entail the gathering of necessary requirements by meeting with project stakeholders and potential users of the site. As stakeholders, we identified the director of the Software Engineering program, Randy Odendahl, as well as Douglas Lea, the chairperson of the Computer Science Department. Primary users of the site will be the faculty associated with the program: it is there responsibility to develop comprehensive lessons, projects and grading rubrics that effectively track student performance. These are the basis for ABET accreditation. Secondary users will be the enrolled students, who will benefit from receiving a degree from an ABET accredited science program.

To further investigate the requirements for the site design, classical user-centered requirements assessment strategies will be employed. These are, for instance, card-sorting assessments, contextual inquiries and expert interviews. The design phase will result, at minimum, in a set of high fidelity prototypes which can then be used in the evaluation phase. The high fidelity prototypes may be functional HTML sites or a non-functional mark-up of a possible site designs using design tools.

The evaluation phase aims at identifying problems in the site design. Since the site serves as a platform to host resources for students as well as students' projects and degree progress, special emphasis during the site design must be placed on disambiguation and clarity of the site's content. Furthermore, the site must be easy to navigate. These properties will be evaluated using classic user-testing methodology; by making use of eye tracking and video recording technology user performance can be analyzed to identify potential pitfalls of the site design. The evaluation of the site will serve as a guideline in the production of the final revision of the SUNY Oswego Software Engineer ABET website.

It shall be clear, that this project is an evaluation project. The main focus will be the evaluation of different design choices. These can then be used to make informed decisions for a final site design. Designing the actual, deployable website is beyond the scope of this project.