CS575Spring 2012Lecture 4*

Bapa RaoCSU LA

* Many Slides borrowed from Scott Klemmer’s Stanford Course Materials

Today’s agenda

• Watch Berners-Lee Lovelace Award Lecture• Conclude needfinding• Get started on design alternatives and

prototyping

Self-Evaluation of needfinding exercise

Quality of Observations

• Self observation & notes• How many others did you observe?• What questions did you have in mind when you

observed?• If you had to do the exercise again, what questions

would you have in mind when observing?

• Please post your self-evaluation on your wiki page under course page

Review of Week 2’s needfinding exercise

• post-earthquake scenario• 5 families on a block• people know their neighbors but not much about anyone else• sporadic phone & internet communication (phone better than internet)• needs

– Injury– food– damage to home– missing relatives / pets

• Getting help to come to you– Procurement– Barter– Keeping track of balance– Money transfer

• different resources– engineering skills– community resources information– money– food

• external connectivity– family members outside disaster zone

Summary of Notes• Adding tradeoffs / detail to requirements (when does mom need to know?)

– Trade time for [what?]• Change• New info

• Have an evolvable plan– If X happens within time Y, we can do Z1, Z2, …

• Explore possible steps• Develop more information and expand possibilities• Refine choices: trade how much food?• Prioritize

– Meet immediate & pressing needs

• Detail plan – Cover self as well as others

• Execute?• Evaluate / correct?• Develop more resources

– Think of unusual resources (e.g., train station)

Summary of needfinding notes, additional

needs /resources:• Material• Human

– Skills, knowledge• InformationGoals• Balance• Prioritize• Inform, UpdateFacilities / functions• Expand• Filter• Communicate: broadcast, narrowcast, pointcast• InventoryModes• Synchronous (human-controlled, e.g.,)• Asynchronous (automatic, e.g.,)

Breakdowns / Opportunities

Breakdowns /workarounds

• Not meeting urgent needs in a timely fashion– First aid kit

• Need for reassurance about safety– Family, pets, …– Increasing priority as time passes

• Motivating Uncooperative or slow players• Planning for future needs (trading away too many resources)• Information and data sharing• Communication and action protocols

– Pre-arranged / develop dynamically during crisis• High priority messages and alerts

Today’s exercise

• Select 7-10 apps– “We need a way to do <x> that will • mitigate breakdown <y> OR • Facilitate workaround <z>

– Can start from wiki page entries– Critique• Plausible• Feasible• Inspiration• Challenges

Today’s exercise contd

• For each selected app– Write top-level use cases– Brainstorm UI design choices• Storyboards

– See A.D. Aziz’s Storyboard notes

• Paper prototypes

• Points of view– Guiding principle--alternatives

Breakdowns /workarounds

• Creative use of resources– Train station for non-standard resources

• Locate and approach nearest police station• Unoccupied stores as resource– How to handle / negotiate extraction of resources

Use Case

[Martin Fowler]Title: "goal the use case is trying to satisfy”Main Success Scenario: numbered list of stepsStep: "a simple statement of the interaction between

the actor and a system”Extensions: separately numbered lists, one per

ExtensionExtension: "a condition that results in different

interactions from .. the main success scenario". An extension from main step 3 is numbered 3a, etc.

Design Alternatives

• “The best way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.” –Linus Pauling

Design as simulated Annealing

• Annealing: In Metallurgy, gradual cooling:– 1000, 900, 975, 950, 970, 925, 960, …

• Simulated annealing:– Local optimumsuboptimumnonlocal optimum

Prototyping

• Strategy for efficiently dealing with things that are hard to predict

Prototypes contd

• Formalism: When is it useful?– Not for its own sake

• Make multiple prototypes simultaneously to get most value

• Consider: what is the cost of making changes over time?

• “Good artists borrow, great artists steal”—Picasso• Klemmer’s Stanford course lecture on Prototyping