April 18th: HAL Presentations and Portfolio/Presentation Workshop

Announcements

• Charlotte STC Meeting
  Tuesday, 4/26/2010 @ 6:30 pm
  Fretwell 107
• Earth Day is Thursday 4/22
  Do something nice for the planet
• UFC 129: Saturday 4/30/2010 @ 10 PM
• ACC Championship Game in Charlotte--12/03

Portfolio Presentations

Each one of you will do a presentation describing your conception of audience and purpose for your User Documents. I want all students to practice public speaking, so I try to have each class I teach do a presentation. The guidelines for this presentation are on the Assignments Page.

If you're doing a Powerpoint presentation (or other presentation), you should save your presentation to your 'H' drive, and create a link to it on your webpage. It's time consuming to have you plug in your flash drives or check your e-mail to access your files. If you don't know how to do that, ask now. My goal is to give you a gauge--an approximate grade--for the class by next week. Of course, many of your grades are on Moodle, so you probably have an idea.

HAL Presentations

Let's move on to the HAL presentations from our 5181 friends. Please be respectful and pay attention to the speakers. These presentations are 4-5 minutes. After the presentation, you may ask relevant, thoughtful questions, but please wait until after the presentation is finished.

The presenters should end before asking for questions.

Final Exam Preview (5/09--Monday, 6:30-9:15)

Your final exam will be based on the reading assigned and activities/discussions we've had since the original midterm exam date (2/28). The exam will be on Moodle (unless something peculiar happens) and will consist of multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, short-answer, and True/False questions.

Topics to pay attention to for the final exam:

Assignment Features

• Personas
• Likert scales and appropriate questions
• Measurable (operationalized goals)
• Screen captures

Degani's Taming HAL Ch. 1-10. While the entire reading is fair game, there are places you ought to pay particularly close attention to.

• Non-determinism and technologies
• Abstractions
• Events, states, and transitions
• User models and machine models
• Concurrency, hierarchy, and synchronization
• Population Stereotypes vs. universal stereotypes
• Initialization (initial mode)
• Mode
• Reference Values
• History Settings
• Default Settings
• Sophisticated interfaces
• A few details from our 5181 students' presentations

Of course, the above is not exhaustive. If you've read carefully (don't skip over the word "carefully"), this should be a breeze.

Portfolios Due in two Weeks (5/02)

Your portfolios are due in two weeks. Take a fresh look at the Assignments Page for details about what to include. The most important thing is the reflective cover letter. That is where you demonstrate that the revision choices you made reflect your understanding of the audience(s) and purpose(s) for the document.

Below is a list of other things to think about when finishing this assignment:

• Planning documents for each User Doc (did you do them the first time?)
  • Descriptions of the instruments
  • Ideal approach/location of the document
  • Personas
  • Measurable (operationalized goals)
  • Post-test questions (likert scales)
  • Citations for borrowed images
  • Citations for borrowed images
  • Citations for borrowed images
  • Citations for borrowed images
  • Citations for borrowed images
• Personas reflect the revision choices you make
• Personas help you conceive of audience
• Personas help you reflect on the purpose of your document
• Document location helps you consider the needs of your audience and should fit with the document's purpose
• Audience and purpose seem important in this reflective cover letter...

Returning User Doc #2

I'm going to pass back your second User Documents after the presentations from your 5182 classmates. Overall, these were much better than the first user docs. Of course, there's always more that can be done. No writing is finished until its published. In fact, it might not be finished then either if you think about digital publishing...and some of you will next semester...that's right.

Please keep all portfolio work that I've commented on. You will turn these originals (User Doc #1, #2,and #3) in with your final portfolio. Not including these drafts will affect your grade.

Please remember that your assignments have two parts--a proposal or planning document and the actual user document. You must have both, or your assignment is incomplete.

Some overall issues:

• "Figure X" and captions
• Circles, arrows, and callouts
  • Try using circles or boxes; they seem to look nicer than arrows
  • Legends work well
• "Results may very"--search results change
• Set buttons, menus, keys, etc. apart from instructional text
• Show how to refine searches to expand your user documents
• Be more efficient in your prose
  • Get right to the search then discuss alternatives
  • Give commands
    • Don't tell the user "If you want to..."; tell them to do it!
    • Avoid redundancy, so you aren't being redundant (get it?):
      "This document called Transferring Pictures to Your Desktop from a Digital Camera describes how to transfer images taken with a digital camera to a desktop."
• Be realistic about where, how, or if these will be used
  • Printed out
  • Online
• Use screen shots
  • Clear, good-sized screen shots
  • Entire screen captures aren't effective
  • Too small of a screen capture is too little
• Personas (Cooper pp. 131-132 & 142-147)
  • Discuss technological literacy instead of motive to use the document or scenarios that set up why the document will benefit personas
  • Have pictures of your personas

Before We Go...

Only two more classes left (and the final exam). Your persona research is due next week (4/25), and your portfolios are due the week after on 5/02 (User Doc #1, #2, & #3 with the reflective cover letter),and you'll do your portfolio presentations.

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