Summary

The task in this project has been to design a good user interface for an address book application on a notebook (the size of an A4 sheet). The notebook will operate mainly by a stylus and is connected wireless to the campus server. In order to accomplish this task we first created a low fidelity prototype. In this phase we did a general task analysis of what the user would want to do in the address book application. When we had finished the task analysis we analyzed what functions we would need to provide and how they were going to be implemented.

We had at an early stage of the project decided that our application should be implemented under BeOS, which is an operating system like Microsoft Windows, using the C++ programming language. We therefore had this programming implementation part in our minds during the low fidelity prototype phase, which actually was a mistake. Because of this we worried too much about how certain functions were going to be implemented and we therefore missed some important functionality. Some programming implementation were also done in this phase which was a mistake too since this approach made it difficult to do major changes to the design.

The preferred way of doing a low fidelity prototype is by designing a paper prototype, which we now understand, and strongly recommend.

After we had designed our low fidelity prototype everyone in our project group did an individual heuristic evaluation of our design. Setting up and using scenarios in order to operate the prototype does the heuristic evaluation. The ten usability heuristics states that the address book prototype should have the following properties to be considered a good design:

When everybody in the project group had done his heuristic evaluation we realized that some changes had to be done to our design. One main lesson we learned during the heuristic evaluation phase was how hard it was to do an evaluation on your own design. We therefore recommend anyone doing a similar project to let people outside the project group do this evaluation. After taking the heuristic evaluations into consideration we did a high fidelity prototype where the functions were implemented using the C++ programming language under BeOS.

Some of the functions in our high fidelity prototype are:


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