International Instruction Sets & Usability Testing: Project Overview

Assignment 2 (Website & Interaction Design): Audience/task analysis & Help design plan

The HU members of the app development groups are responsible for creating two design documents on their own: an audience and task analysis and a help design plan. (There are other documents that you will create in collaboration with the CS students—see “Project Assignment 2” on the CS website.)

Audience & Task Analysis

For this component of the assignment, you will use the information that you collect during the scientist interviews to create a 1-2 page memo memo that defines the user profile for the app and that gives an overview of major goals and tasks that users will accomplish with the app. This memo should be addressed to me, Dr. Pastel, and your CS group members.

The memo should define the major groups of users who will be using the app. The information that defines your user profile will mostly be drawn from your interview with the scientist, but it can also be grounded in other research. Cite sources, including the interview, as appropriate. Give as much information about these users as you can (demographic information, technological skill level, scientific knowledge, and so on).

The memo should also outline the major goals that users will try to achieve by using the app, the main tasks that they will perform with the app to accomplish these goals, and the contexts in which they will be using the app to achieve these goals. This task analysis does not need to go into great detail, as the CS students are performing a more detailed hierarchical task analysis. The goal here is to get a big picture overview of how, why, and in what environments different user groups will be using this app.

Help design plan

For this portion of the assignment, the HU members of your team should write a separate 1 - 2 page memo addressed to me, Dr. Pastel, and the CS group members describing your tentative plan for the application's documentation. Your plan should address the following points (not necessarily in this order):

 the type of documentation that you plan to include. (for example: tutorials, reference information such as definitions of terms/icons, procedural information) and how it will be included (will it be internal to the app, external, or both? How will it be integrated into the app?)  explanation of how the app’s interface and interaction design will inform the documentation. How will the user access the help? How will the user interact with it? How will help and other documentation be designed into the app interface? If you like, you can include visual representations of the proposed interface if you like.  your rationale for the help design plan (for example, you might discuss how it was informed by discussions with the scientist and CS group, by your research into the design of other apps, and so on)

Of course, your plan will likely be modified as the project progresses, but this memo will give you a starting point. These documents should be posted to your group’s website.