Imagine that your team has been contracted by Microsoft to evaluate how usable the Office 365 calendar is for the average university student. They want to know why so few students are using the calendar despite it being freely available and what they can do to make the calendar more usable for university students. Your task is to first learn what university students want and need from an online calendar system (design requirements). Then evaluate the Office 365 calendar based on those requirements.
You will be completing the coursework in groups of 3-4. Each group member will be responsible for completing and writing up one of the methodologies listed below. Within the group:
The group is then responsible for writing an executive summary of the usability of Office365 calendar based on the outcomes of each of the methods.
It is highly recommended that group members share results early and build on each others' work. For example, a Think Aloud is much easier to conduct if the researcher already knows from prior studies the types of tasks their users engage in.
All University of Edinburgh students and staff have free access to Office365 which includes access to both Outlook and the calendar.
Each member of the team must select one of the methodologies below and be responsible for its write-up. Any number of team members can be involved in performing the required activities and helping with the evaluation; however, only the named team member will receive marks for it. The recommended page length is between 3 and 5 pages. If you feel you need more than 5 pages to explain what you did, that is fine but please think about usability from the perspective of the markers first. 40 of the 50 available marks will be assessed individually based on this component.
Please click on each methodology for details of how it should be performed and written up.
Design Requirements Usability EvaluationThe whole team is responsible for writing an executive summary of the evaluation. The summary will be between one and two pages. It must mention elements from all the evaluations and how they add up to an overall view of the usability of Office365 calendar.
If the group made any broad decision up-front it should be mentioned in the summary. For example, if you decided to only focus on Masters level students, or you decided to include family members of students in your evaluation. Most groups will not have such a statement, but if you did make any up-front scoping decisions please state so.
This section is worth 10 of the available 50 marks and every member of the team will receive the same mark for it regardless of amount of contribution. If one member has not completed their individual component by October 16th the team may optionally choose to exclude that evaluation from the executive summary. If this happens, please clearly state so at the end of the summary.
If possible, please submit one document for the whole group. Electronic submissions are preferred but you may also turn in a paper copy to the ITO.
To submit the document electronically use the submit command, replacing "report.pdf" with your document name:
submit hci 1 report.pdf
The 3-5 page recommendation is intended as a guide to help you understand how much detail I am looking for. Each methodology will require a slightly different amount of detail to describe it appropriately. Some online Googling suggests that 5 pages at 10pt font is around 3500 words and 3 pages is 2000 words. The page limit is intended to be single space, if you want to use double space then just double the limit, so max 10 pages double spaced.
The page limits are very much guides. If anyone turns in a one page document which perfectly answers all the stated questions I will happily give them full marks, but I consider this event very unlikely. If anyone gives me a 50 page version I will similarly give it full marks if answers all the questions, but am very likely to be grumpy by the end of reading it.
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