In-class design study—Public transit development

Due T 2022-02-18, 11:59pm EST 8pts 70 min

Please ask any questions about this assignment in class, or later today on Canvas in the Discussion: In-class design study—Public transit development discussion.

You will work with other students on this assignment.

Table of Contents

• Change Log
• Aim of the assignment
• Background info
• Instructions
  • Setup
  • Interview
  • Identify & abstract tasks
  • Individual sketching
  • Joint sketching
• Submission instructions
• Grading rubric

Change Log

• N/A.

Aim of the assignment

For your projects—and possibly in your careers—you will need to be able to develop a visualization that will actually solve a target user’s problem. In this assignment, you will get practice conducting an interview, analyzing the target user’s tasks & goals to create a task abstraction, and using that abstraction to design a visualization tool that can help solve their problem.

Background info

Recall Shel Israel’s advice for conducting interviews we discussed in the previous class:

• Have a designated note-taker and designated leader
• Be prepared. (Have some questions prepared in advance.)
• Start slow, safe, and personal.
• Coax, don’t hammer.
• Make some questions open ended.
• Ask what you don’t know.
• Let the interviewees wander a bit–but be careful.
• Listen, really listen.
• For software, look for “work arounds” and hacks.
• Make sure to write down your thoughts and impressions immediately after the interview.
• You are the visualization expert–don’t ask them what vis they want, don’t think too early about what vis to build.

Instructions

Throughout this assignment, you are welcome to ask the in-person TAs or Cody online for help or feedback. Cody will be in the normal Zoom room for the class which is linked on the homepage. To avoid echo when you join the Zoom room, please sit far away from the front of the room where the TAs’ microphones are or go out in the hall temporarily.

Setup

2 min

1. Break into groups of ~3 people.

   • In-person attendees, please form in-person groups.
   • People attending remotely (with prior instructor permission) will be assigned to Zoom breakout rooms.

2. Start writing a document in your favorite collaborative word processor / document preparation system (i.e. Google Docs, Office 365, Overleaf), with In-class design study—Public transit development as the title and the names of the group members listed right below it.

Interview

17 min

You will practice interviewing a simulated transportation engineer.

1. Create a new section titled Interview notes.
2. Prepare a list of questions you want to ask in your interview about the job of your target users: transportation engineers. Transportation engineers are responsible for designing the most effective mix of transit options for a city. E.g., someone who would work for the MBTA or the City of Boston that would figure out all the logistics of bus routes, trains, road lanes given to cars vs. bikes vs. busses, where interstates should be, etc. It would be helpful to pick one specific use case to target in your interview.

3. Take turns conducting the interviews and being interviewed.

   • Each student should get a turn being the simulated user. Try to get into their shoes as much as possible.
   • Each student should also get a turn being the interviewer and asking questions to your simulated user.
   • The odd person out each time should take copious notes from the interview in your shared doc under the Interview notes section heading.

Identify & abstract tasks

17 min

1. Create a page break so you start on a new page.
2. Write Tasks as a section heading.

3. Discuss the user tasks and goals and abstract them using the taxonomy from VAD (refer to Fig. 3.1). Create a table in this section to organize them. Follow this outline:

   Task ID#	Domain Task	Analytic Task (low-level, “query”)	Search Task (mid-level)	Analyze Task (high-level)
   1	Examining a phylogenetic tree, which species are classified as mammals?	Filter	Locate	Present
   …	…	…	…	…

   • First, fill-in the “Domain” task column which represents all the tasks your user wants to accomplish with the data/visualization. Rank the tasks from most to least important, top to bottom.
   • Next, translate these domain tasks into computer science terminology by identifying what low-, mid-, and/or high-level tasks it represents. Make sure to fill in each cell of the table! The original paper (Brehmer and Munzner, 2013) specifies that “Complete task descriptions … must include nodes from all three parts of this typology.”

   Reminder: If you have any questions about whether you’re performing the task abstraction correctly, ask the TA’s or Cody to review them for you before you get too far into creating sketches.

4. Reorder the tasks and rank them by decreasing priority.

Individual sketching

17 min

1. Create a page break so you start on a new page.
2. Write Individual sketches as a section heading.
3. Create a subsection for each member of the group using their name as the subsection heading.
4. Individually—and on paper—create several low-fidelity sketches of possible visualizations that can address the abstract tasks. Each student should have at least 3 sketches.
5. Photograph the sketches and add them to their authors’ subsections.

Joint sketching

17 min

1. Create a page break so you start on a new page.
2. Write Joint sketch as a section heading.
3. Create one polished high-fidelity visualization sketch that uses the best components you came up with in the individual sketching. If there are interactive components, you can create a storyboard and/or use annotations to describe what changes and how.
   • In-person attendees, this should be done on paper.
   • People attending remotely (with prior instructor permission) can use digital tools to collaborate.
4. Add the final sketch to this section.
5. Write the ranked tasks the visualization would support directly below the sketch.

Submission instructions

One person from the group should create a PDF from your document and ensure it contains everything required for the 4 parts. They should then submit it as a single PDF to the assignment In-class design study—Public transit development on GradeScope.

Note: Use Gradescope’s Group Members tab to add the members of your group to your submission.

Note: Use GradeScope’s “tagging” interface to associate the pages of the PDF with their associated questions of the rubric.

Grading rubric

Like usual, the visualizations should follow our the best practices and everything you’ve learned in class up to this point. E.g., include axis labels, appropriate scales, titles, legends, annotations, be neat and clean (not cluttered). Points will be deducted for poor quality or confusing visualizations. Likewise, points will be deducted for spelling and grammar mistakes or not following the directions.