ABET Program Certification
HCI 551 Project 2

download Project Documentation (.pdf)

Analyzing the users' needs is essential in identifying the features that the system must be able to perform and that the interface must offer to the users. However, assessing these needs is a double-edged process – it is necessary to quantitatively measure and record what actions are executed by the users, as well as, how the user expects to accomplish those actions. On the other hand, as is often the case, there exist features that the users do not know they need or even want. This can not be quantitatively measured, but must be assessed through a healthy portion of intuition, experience, and observation.

However, by filling the front end with options and features that are only rarely used, or not needed at all, will lead to a crowded, convoluted and confusing interface, as a result, actually hindering the user experience and the effectiveness of the interface. It is of major importance to keep the interface simple and stream-lined. We hence conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with the project stakeholders to assess the basic needs and requirements of the users. Also, the personas helped in identifying potential pitfalls in user interaction by showing what minimal features must not be absent from the prototypes.

From the semi-structured interviews and the user identification that lead to the personas in the earlier section, we concluded that the priority of the interface features shall be on content modification (which includes adding, deleting, or changing of rubrics, objectives and guidelines). The prototypes developed for this project therefore will include the ability to add ABET guidelines, degree program objectives (along with their grading rubrics) and students. Also, ease of modification of the mapping between the guidelines and objectives will be a reasonable requirement for the interface, since these mappings may change frequently. This is due to the nature of the prototype domain being widely flexible and specific details about mappings from ABET guidelines to degree program objectives changing quite frequently in the future.

Additionally, information presentation is of prime importance for all user groups. Especially for the primary and secondary user group, it is important for the prototypes to allow a quick, but thorough overview of the content. We assume that the success of different prototype alternatives will be mostly dependent on their ability to present the underlying information efficiently and effectively.