Pride of Szeged

As we move further into KMT2 development, it becomes more and more obvious that we could use some better information about how to create effective user interfaces and, more generally, better meet the needs of our users. To that end, I'm considering signing up for SILS course 357: Seminar in Human-Computer Interaction with Gary Marchionini.

I enjoyed my class with Marchionini during my first go round at SILS, and never felt like I got as much out of the class as I should have. This more advanced class might be more useful at this stage because I have an objective on which to focus my attention- how to make the KMT better.

The class meets 12:30-3:15 PM on Wednesdays, and the semester starts soon, so I guess I better make a decision and then figure out what I need to do to get in…

edit: Here's the syllabus page for the course from last year- http://ils.unc.edu/~march/courses/357_f04/syllabus.html

Doing research on how to go about creating storyboards for the KMT2, I found this pretty-useful (Powerpoint) presentation on the subject- "Storyboarding the User Interface: Blueprint for an Application". I'll summarize the parts of this that I found helpful, so you don't have to load the whole thing:

• Definition – "A user interface storyboard is a visual script or a blueprint of everything that will be contained in an application or website."
• What a storyboard is – A working image of the product in its preliminary stage; a means of visual communication for testing with users
• What it is not – a ist of Functional Requirements, a Flow Chart, a UI style guide, etc.
• Provides common vision to cross-functional groups (developers, QA, technical writers, etc.)
• helps ensure better planning early in the process that saves on resources and reduces bugs at the end

The presentation also provides several examples of storyboarding, including first drafts, revisions, and final versions. Which is helpful as I explore what we need to do.

Obviously, this view of storyboarding focuses heavily on User Interface design, but ultimately, I think that provides a common language that all the stakeholders (developers, editors, and end users) can understand.

In any case, now my task is to adapt these ideas to our KMT2 use cases. Right now I'll be focusing on the sketchiest of details about the UI, trying to focus on how a user's actions carry him or her through the workflow.

One essential challenge we need to resolve, however, is the question of whether we intend to have a "tabbed" or "popup" interface. Which is better for users? Which is harder to implement? What are the questions we need answered before we can decide this detail?

As part of the process of getting the KMT2 project moving forward, our group has been meeting to put all of our ideas and documents together into cohesive plan. This is proving more difficult than it seems, since our documentation is spread out over a number of systems (email, chats, meeting minutes, brainstorms on whiteboards, etc).

One method that we're looking at to help focus our efforts are the "Readyset" development worksheet templates available from tigris.org.

Another tool I'm looking at- to help with some of the overall project management aspects of this effort- is Basecamp, a web-based tool for keeping track of to-do lists, deadlines, meeting notes, etc. I intend to play around with this in my spare moments, just to see how useful it might be (but without wasting everybody else's time just yet). My prototype Basecamp project is located at http://kmt2.projectpath.com/. More on this as I get time…