Labs/Course/UCD/courseoutline

<<Open Design and Research

Intro - A Collaborative Course

This is a User Centered Design course in collaboration with Mozilla Labs

Course Content

Ethnographic user studies, problem synthesis and product design - Application of user centred design methods on a complex real-life problem.

• Ethnographic user studies: Ethnographic user studies, video analysis, contextual interviews, etc.
• Problem synthesis: Affinity diagram, card sorting, problem identification, etc.
• Product design: Ideation workshop, scenario design, storyboard, interaction design, etc.

Proposed Structure

This course is structured with (guest) lectures, hands-on exercises, project assignment and presentations. It contains three phases:

• Phase one: Discovering (unarticulated) user needs
  • Conduct field studies with at least 3 users.
  • Mozilla Guest Lecture: The value of early stage user study and how to make it successful in real work
  • Mozilla can help with the user interview consent forms
• Phase two: Product design based on detected user needs
  • Brainstorm ideas on user needs, create scenarios or storyboards, subsequently develop a meaningful idea into a paper prototype, conduct user testing, revise the concept and create an interactive prototype (using HTML, CSS and JS), continue testing product.
  • Mozilla Guest Lecture: Applying leading technology in your prototype
  • Mozilla mentor on user testing techniques and interactive prototyping
• Phase three: Documentation
  • Mozilla can provides online space and promotion channels
  • Contents will be shared to the public under the CC license.

Deliverable Examples

• Phase one:
  • User profiles
  • Design problems that are detected from Ethnographic user studies. <in format of video, text document or posters>
• Phase two:
  • Storyboards or scenarios
  • Wireframes
  • High-fidelity paper prototypes
  • Interactive prototype in format of HTML, CSS and JS
• Phase three:
  • Blog post
  • Video
  • Associate with Mozilla Labs Concept Series, get publicity on Mozilla Planet with has 300M readers over the world.

Tentative Schedule - Weekly

• week 1: Decide on your users and user research methods
• week 2: Conduct your user research and create personas
• week 3: Identify problems based on user research data
• week 4: Create scenarios and storyboards
• week 5: Revise your concept and create wireframes
• week 6: Create paper prototypes and conduct user testing
• week 7: Semester break
• week 8: Revise your concept and start with the interactive prototype
• week 9: Develop prototype, do user testing
• week 10: Revise your concept and finalise prototype
• week 11: Final presentations
• week 12: Document your project (blog post and video)

Assessment