Chase Maier
Technical Lead & Senior Software Engineer
Project Details
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Media Gallery
University Bookstore Kiosk
This was a multiphase project requiring both individual and group contributions from the User Interface Design (CS 476) course at the University of Montana. For this assignment we were initially only given a very simplistic statement requiring that we design a hypothetical kiosk that would be placed in the University of Montana's campus bookstore. The project began as an individual project where each person was individually responsible for developing their own design. After several iterations had been made upon each individual's design, groups were formed and we were required to develop a shared design incorporating the best characteristics of each group member's design.
Through the course of the project it was our responsibility to work with the potential users of the kiosk system as well as bookstore staff members who would be responsible for the management, maintenance, and support of the kiosk once they were implemented in order to develop the specific system requirements needed to form the basis for the designs that we were creating. This included fully developing a list of physical requirements, functional requirements, and applicable use cases that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of our design prototypes.
After developing design prototypes that we believed effectively satisfied all requirements that had been defined for the project we began the process of acquiring design critiques from others intimately familiar with the project. Using these critiques from other groups participating in the same project, the instructor of the course, and the individuals with which we had worked to develop the initial project requirements we were able to iterate upon our design and make adjustments to better satisfy the requirements of the project or otherwise increase the usability of the system.
Finally, we began to turn our prototype mockups into a functional prototype which we could use to perform accurate usability testing making use of human subjects not intimately familiar with the project. These usability tests consisted of several hours per test subject of completing surveys and passive observation as the subject made use of the functional prototype we had developed in order to show how they would use the kiosk interface to complete a list of tasks while providing verbal and written feedback throughout the entire process.
You can find a sample of a portion of the customer-facing user interface in the media gallery on this page. This kiosk was designed to make use of a touchscreen monitor for both the primary input and output device.
