Process Overview

Planning
We had a lengthy pre-planning phase during which one member of our team worked at CBE on the occupant satisfaction survey project as a Graduate Student Researcher starting in June 2002. As her duties encompassed the coordination of the survey project, we gradually gathered information and understanding of the needs for a tool to help the research group benchmark building quality by analyzing survey data to understand how different building technologies affect occupants’ perceived satisfaction levels. The other member of our team was also brought on by CBE as a GSR in January 2003. Because we worked so closely with the organization, we were able to develop a deep understanding of the existing technology and systems, and the needs going forward.

Our timetable for the project was as follows:

Analysis
The analysis phase began last fall with the development of a needs assessment questionnaire, an early version of which we put to use in an interview of one of the GSR’s working at CBE who makes use of the survey for his own research project. This phase began in earnest this winter with a series of interviews with researchers and others interested in exploring the survey data. With a more finely-tuned questionnaire, and open-ended oral interview questions, we interviewed several participants likely to become users of the finished product. During this needs assessment we worked to listen carefully to our users, and then come to some agreement within the team about what the high priorities were, how to manifest them in the application, and how to later assess user satisfaction with the implementation.

We were fortunate to have access to the in-house researchers and others comprising the ArchMiner user base, including industry partners, other research organizations, and government entities sponsoring CBE research. Their input was indispensable in helping us focus the application’s feature set and workflow.

Design
Two first-year students joined the team in the context of a graduate course in the SIMS program, InfoSys 213: User Interface Design and Development. The four of us worked closely to produce a design that would deliver what our users wanted. We rapidly iterated through several designs, arriving at the current design through use of “Low-fi” (paper) prototypes, as well as early interactive prototypes implemented in Java that met with heuristic evaluation. At each stage we tested the design on our users, and collected valuable feedback we used to rework our design.

The backend architecture was already in place, and the database populated with a vast amount of survey data, so our design took this existing structure into consideration. As GSRs working actively on the survey project, we also had the capability of being able to modify that structure if needed.

Implementation

Development
At the beginning of the development phase, we took the time to map out the architecture of the Java code using Class-Responsibility-Collaboration (CRC) cards, working together to understand what the major objects would be and what they would use in common. We each took ownership of a part of the program, but worked together closely to ensure that the pieces worked well together, often producing multiple daily builds of our integrated code.

Testing
As discussed above, during this iterative process we conducted testing at several key points, assessing user satisfaction with our design and folding this feedback into our continuing implementation. Recently we conducted a pilot usability study with two GSRs and one researcher, all of whom are actively analyzing CBE survey data. While this was not a full-fledged usability study, we conducted observations and afterwards collected measurements using a written questionnaire containing Likert scales, and also conducted an interview with open-ended questions. Based on the overwhelmingly positive response we received during this exercise, we believe user acceptance rates will be favorable.

The process of moving from planning to systems analysis, to user interface design, to implementation was quite instructive. The need to work closely on the design and implementation process, moving the work forward in a team environment without anyone being officially in charge. Although to that extent this project represents a slightly artificial representation of project management in a real organization, it was excellent practice nonetheless.