Project 3: Project Specification¶

Learning Goals¶

Negotiate a project plan with your partner organization and identify deliverables
Translating requirements into actionable user stories
Determine the project timeline
Consider the human subjects that will be impacted by your project
Learn to visualize your ideas in a wireframe

Project Context¶

Your team has been formed and has normed. It is time to perform. You have several tasks ahead of you.

Meet with your partner organization to discuss your project ideas and negotiate what you will do for them.
Work with the partner organization to identify an initial set of project requirements.
Turn those requirements into user stories and enter them into your project management system.
Divvy up the user stories and project requirements and assign responsibilities to each team member.
Create a Gantt chart for your user stories and project deliverables. This will be your project timeline.
Begin your design with a UI mockup, a wireframe, or a storyboard to illustrate the concept you want to make.

Deliverables¶

Partner Organization Meeting¶

You must set up a meeting with your partner organization ASAP. This can be in person or via video conferencing. Record the meeting if possible, so you have a reference to refer to in case you forget what you agreed to. Assign one member of your team to take notes in a Google Doc.

In this meeting, you should talk through what your partner organization would like you to do. You may offer alternative ideas, especially those you presented in your Project Pitches. Discuss all your options, while always considering your relatively short 6-7 week project timeline to ensure you can get everything done on time. Come to an agreement about what you want to do for them. The project must be either an accessibility evaluation project or an application solution.

An accessibility evaluation and improvement project will evaluate a pre-existing application or web site from the partner organization for accessibility by their target clientelle. You will engage with several members of their clientelle to do an in-person evaluation. Then you will design improvements and conduct a usability evaluation on the results. Your deliverables are an updated application design or web site as well as a project report describing the results of the initial accessibility study, the re-design process, and the evaluation of the redesign.
An application solution design and evaluation project will create a new application solution for an accessibility problem from the partner organization. You will engage in a co-design process with classmates and clients of the partner organization, develop the new application, web site, or tool, and then evaluate your application with additional clients of the partner organization. Your deliverables are the new application solution and a project report describing your co-design process, design mockups, final design, application documentation, and a writeup of the evaluation of the application.

Continue negotiating if the project idea does not fit into one of these two project types.

Turn in your notes as part of the deliverable for this assignment.

Requirements¶

Once you have agreed to a project concept, meet with your team members to identify the project requirements. This may involve communicating with the partner organization again to get answers to any questions or ambiguities you need to resolve.

Turn in a list of these requirements as part of the deliverable for this assignment.

User Stories¶

Discuss potential functional requirements of this project. Consider what possible use cases may be for this system and what features it should have to fulfill those needs.

Then, document these functional requirements in the form of user stories. Use whatever user story format you have learned in class or used in prior group projects. User stories related to user interfaces should contain wireframes, mockups, or storyboards.

You should come up with at least two user stories per student in your group.

Formulating User Stories

Consider what are the different types of users that will be interacting with your system (your stakeholders) and what features they would want to have. You may want to reference features in existing systems that may be desirable, or conduct interviews with your peers who could be potential users of this system.

As a team, you should then come up with a prioritization ranking for each user story. The prioritization should be based on two factors

Impact: how essential is this user story to the overall functionality of the application to your stakeholders, how beneficial it would be to your stakeholders, and
Effort: how much time/effort is required to implement this user story

Once you have your list of user stories, add them to your project management system. In the body of each of these user stories, provide a brief but concrete justification of its prioritization ranking that your team decided on. You should order all the user stories in this column from highest to lowest priority.

As part of your project deliverable, we will read through the user stories on your project management system.

Mini-IRB¶

We want to give you the flavor of what it is like to do academic user research. As you develop your project idea and project plan, we ask you to fill out an Institutional Review Board protocol documentation form. This will be a (very) simplified version of the form that CMU requires all researchers to fill out when doing user studies. It will prompt you to be very specific about the kinds of users you will engage with your project process and require that you plan, in detail, what you intend to do with them, way before you ever get one of them in a room.

Complete this protocol form and this consent form and include them as part of your project deliverable.

Gantt Chart¶

Now that you have your prioritized list of user stories, consider the technical requirements of the various user stories and collectively decide on which one(s) you will be focusing on over the next two milestones. In this project (as like most projects), your team is aiming to maximize the amount of value you are delivering to your stakeholders given your constraints.

Your selected user stories should have relatively high priority based on your team's ranking, and you should actively take factors into consideration that may impact your development.

Selecting Appropriate User Stories

Given the amount of variations in each team's user stories, it's hard to give concrete guideline on the number of user stories that a team needs to tackle. Teams could tackle 1 user story that requires major effort, or a few user stories that each requires lesser effort.

In general, we are expecting that user stories be selected given:

2 milestones of about 2 weeks each
number of team members on your team
assumption of 9 hours/week available per individual

The course staff is happy to discuss this with your team during office hours and we highly recommend you do so if your team is unsure. We will also be providing you with feedback during your first milestone.

Most project management systems have the ability to turn your prioritized user stories into a Gantt Chart. Take a snapshot of this Gantt chart and turn it in as part of your project deliverable. You will want to keep this chart up to date as whenever you meet with the course instructors about the project, we will ask to see your current Gantt Chart.

User Story Assignment¶

Assign every user story expected to be done in the first milestone to a member of your project team. Be sure this assignment is visible in the project management system. Over time, you may reassign user stories to balance your team's workload.

Storyboards¶

For each user story you have prioritized to be done for your project, pull out any UI mockups, storyboards, or wireframes and consolidate them in this section of your project deliverable.

Deliverables and Deadlines¶

There is one group deliverable for this project. This part is worth 168 points, or 20% of your project grade. This part is due October 24, 2024 11:59pm.

To receive full credit for the project specification, we expect that all sections listed above are included in a PDF document submitted to Gradescope.