Usability Interface Project

Course: Software Engineering (CPSC 430)

Assignment: Usability Interface Project

After the halfway point of this semester, my implementation group and I had to work on an indivdual assignment that will help us for the creation of our system.

For this Usability Interface Project assignment, it’s basically designing own user interface. There are parts in this assignment that would help us to create a user interface for our system. The first step was to create three imaginary users that will use our system. Basically, we would write a little story about each of the user, and explain the characteristics about each of them that may influence their interactions with our software. Reasons like that would make them use our software and what software features that will be important to each of them should be included in the story.

The second part was to create a single paragraph describing our software’s overall functions and goals. So, we had to explain who we are making the software for and why. After doing that, one primary function had to be chosen that our software would be able to support. Then with the paragraph and the chosen primary function, we had to ask non-CPSC majors and/or CPSC majors a certain series of questions about the two. After collecting comments from 4-6 people, we had to summarize the ideas into a single coherent explaination of how the feature will work.

The third part was to create an image(s) for the selected feature from the second part/step 2 as a prototype for our software. Part four is to allow the same people to read the paragraph for part one and then show them the images to each person and ask them how they think they need to interact with the software to make it perform the way it should be. Then part five is based on the comments provided by the people in part 4, make any necessary changes to the user interface prototype.

Here is a link to see my Usability Interface Project: Click here

After working on the Usability Interface Project, I learned a lot of things. One of it was grabbing the perspective of how another person would use our software and what software features would be important for them to use in certain cases. Another thing I learned was that I understood how a certain function should perform, interacted with, what it should do and not do after interviewing people about it. Another thing I learned was that I got the idea of how to create a user interface for a certain feature based on the comments provided by people from what they saw of the image prototype given to them or in general.

I would do a couple things differently in my Usability Interface Project if I had the chance to do it again. One thing I would do differently is put more details needed in each of my imaginary user paragraph. I feel like I should have expanded more in each of the paragraphs I wrote of each of the imaginary users. The other thing I would do differently is choose a different feature. The feature I chose was the login which was a really simple one. The last thing I would do differently is summarize the ideas into a single coherent explanation of how the features will work. The reason is that because when I submitted this project, I forgot to do that part.