I hope to have any/all work that’s currently in the grading slushpile turned around and sent back by Tuesday evening. Also, just a reminder, while we were originally slated to complete 10 quizzes and 10 exercises this semester, that pace was killing us. Those of  you who are playing along at home will notice that we’re not going to get to 10. I’ll try to find a way to hide the “empties” that are cluttering up your gradebooks and freaking some of you out.

Here’s the skinny on this week.

Course Evaluations Available Now

The online course evaluations for this class are available now. Please, please, please fill them out and include comments. (You might want to wait until after you’re done with the group projects, in case you have a major epiphany and completely change your mind about the course.)

As you know this is the first time we’ve offered this course online with this new textbook and these particular projects. If there were projects you liked/felt like you learned from, projects that made your life miserable, opinions on the textbook, etc. let me know. I’m particularly interested in any suggestions you have regarding the group project. We have to do something “group” to meet the learning objectives for technical writing, but I know that online groups are about 1000 times harder than regular groups.

Report Drafts

Here’s what you should be doing this week: Drafting those final Usability Recommendation Reports (see materials distributed last week).

If your team is close to having a first draft together and you’d like some feedback, send me your draft via WebCampus mail by midweek. If you can get it to me by Wednesday, I can get it back to you by Friday.

If your team isn’t quite at the draft review stage yet, feel free to pick my brain re: “how do we pull this thing together? distribute work? etc.” Comments here are always good, but you can also send email via WebCampus.

Wrapping up the Project with a PAM

One quick reminder, next week you’ll have to write a Project Assessment Memo and fill out a collaborative project evaluation form after you turn in your final report. Very important — You have two options:

1. Collectively, turn in one Project Assessment Memo for your entire group, along with a collaborative project evaluation form for each member of your group. (Send everything through WebCampus email.)
2. Individually, turn in one Project Assessment Memo from each person in your group, along with an individual collaborative project evaluation form. Again, send through WebCampus email.

Woe to you if your group has decided to turn in a group PAM and you submit an individual PAM. First, you won’t get credit for doing it. Second, past experience has taught me that the individual submitting the solo PAM when the group opted for the group option is frequently the individual who ha contributed the very least to the group effort. (One semester, a guy submitted an individual PAM about his hard work on his team’s report about Greece. Sadly, his team’s report was about Ireland.)

That’s it for today!

Dr. S.

Even better news? Once your team’s progress report is in, your team can proceed full steam ahead on your final usability report. No quizzes, exercises, or discussion from here on out.

The Oral Presentation component is officially cancelled. That means, you have roughly two weeks to complete your team’s final usability report.

Optional Instructor Review

If your team wishes to submit a draft of your final report for Optional Instructor Review, you should submit it by midnight Sunday. Because we have relatively few groups, we have a little wiggle room here, but not much. I cannot give you any feedback if you get your draft to me after noon on Tuesday.

Resources that will help you make it through to the end

1. Make sure you read the assignment carefully. I’m sending a copy of the assignment sheet, which provides an extremely detailed description of how to write the report, out through WebCampus, but you’ll also find a copy on our main WebCampus course content page in the Resources and Samples folder.
2. Chapter 18 of the textbook has extremely useful guidance for virtually every part of a formal report. Reading this chapter is an excellent idea. No quiz. (But when you get around to writing your final project assessment memo, you may find you want to reference the specific parts of this chapter that influenced your work on the final report.)
3. AFTER you’ve reviewed the assignment sheet for this project and read Chapter 18 of the textbook, you might want to take a look at the sample reports included in the Resources and Samples folder on our main WebCampus course content page. Remember that these are samples of student work, not models of how you should do things. The samples themselves range from pretty good to pretty iffy, but each individual sample has both strengths and weaknesses.Your team can get the best use out of these samples if everyone looks them over (keeping assignment requirements and principles from readings in mind), then talks about things in the samples you think are effective (that you’d like to imitate or emulate) and things you think are ineffective (cruddiness that you’d like to avoid in your own project). As a point of reference, I’ve also included a couple of samples of real-world usability reports, so you can compare how professionals approach things.
4. Don’t overlook the work you’ve already done on this project; you’ve generated a fair amount of boilerplate at this stage of the game. Your original proposal, research design plan and usability test materials, and your progress report will all have materials you can recycle and include in the final report. You should be able to revise and reuse some key components from previous documents. Do not just cut and paste without revising and looking hard to make sure your boilerplate content has been seemlessly integrated.

Okay, I believe that’s it for today. Shout out loud if you have questions.

Dr. S.

As you may have deduced, the Oral Presentation part of this project doesn’t involve actually giving an oral presentation. It involves taking the findings from your Progres Report and converting them into a PowerPoint presentation accompanied by a full script for the talk you would give to a client — usually at the same time that you formally present the final recommendation report to the client. I usually include this component because most of you get a lot of experience giving presentations, but not a lot of experience scripting formal presentations.

I’m thinking you all are working yourselves into something like a zombie-state with all of your group work in your various classes and you could use a few less things on your collective plates. On the other hand, some of you may really need some experience scripting formal presentations that support the content of a formal written report. We have a couple of options. We can cancel the presentation assignment outright and just roll those points over to the recommendation report (which is the final project for the semester); we can leave it optional so that your team can elect to do both the presentation and the recommendation report, with points allocated as the syllabus describes, or we can go with the original game plan and require a presentation and a recommendation report from every time.

I’m leaving it up to all of you all to make the call. Feel free to ring in with your comments here.

Dr. S.

P.S. – If you have advance warning that your team may not make the deadline for the progress report, make sure someone on your team gives me a heads up via WebCampus email. As long as I know you have something coming by mid-week next week, there won’t be a late penalty. We have quite a few different takes on usability testing going on, and some of them entail whole teams getting together over the weekend to run tests — which will make it difficult for people to get data analyzed and a progress report pulled together before the deadline.

1. Complete your usability testing and analyze your test data.Some of you come from majors where you do a lot of field testing and data analysis. If this area is new to you, might want to take a look at my lecture notes on how to do data analysis. (These are notes from the f2f class last summer, so disregard any comments in here re: timetables, due dates or work previously completed.) My notes: jms_usability_data_analysis Also available in Learning Module and WebCampus email.
2. Submit an informal progress report for your team by midnight Sunday (one report per team). You’ll find an assignment description for this report in the Informal Reports Learning Module. I’m also sending a back-up copy to your WebCampus mailboxes.

Before you start work on the progress report, you should read Chapter 17 in the textbook, but you don’t need to read the whole chapter. You can skip the rest, but you should definitely read these sections:

• Understanding the Process of Writing Informal Reports
• Writing Progress and Status Reports
• Writer’s Checklist

If you’re not great with visuals, you’ll want to check out Chapter 13 in the textbook for guidance on how to properly select, construct and integrate graphics.

No quiz this week — I should be able to tell whether you can apply the concepts from the readings by looking at your Progress Reports.

No discussion this week — you should be plenty busy discussing your usability testing and analyzing your test results.

If you have questions, post ‘em here.

Enjoy the windy day.

Dr. S.

A couple of teams are still wrapping up the final version of those documents. Get those wrapped up and turned in as soon as you can (bigger teams, I realize you’re at a logistical disadvantage here, and since you gave me healthy advanced warning, there’s no penalty for being late.) You don’t have to have your final design plan turned in before you start usability testing; once your testing protocols are in their final shape, you can start your user tests (even if you’re still putting the final touches on the design planning memo.

A couple of options for doing your user tests:

1. Get a couple people on your team together in a convenient location, bring in all five of your test subjects, and have them do the test one at a time. One of you moderate, the other one record. If you have three people doing the testing you can have a moderator, someone who records what the test subject says, and someone who records what the test subject does.
2. Distribute the testing burden and have each person on your team do the test a couple of times. If you use this distributed model, you’ll be much better off in the long run if you can coerce a friend into helping you. Have the friend act as the moderator, and you serve as the recorder/observer.

Remember the goal of your testing is to generate enough data so that you can analyze it, code it so you can spot trends, and then come up with recommendations for improving the website that are supported by your test findings and by any outside research you’ve done.

Once you’ve finished your user testing, you can analyze your data, and then write the informal progress report that is due at the end of this week. Because of our ongoing issues with the WebCampus assignment feature, I’ll send the assignment details for the progress report to you via WebCampus email later today.

In the meantime, if you have questions, post ‘em here.

Dr. S.

All:

WebCampus is blocking my every effort to access the Assignment Tab and the Assignment Dropbox today. In light of the persistent and seemingly irresolvable problem with system errors and the assignment page, I propose that we simply stop using it. When you have a moment, please resubmit your final Instructions Project as an attachment in WebCampus email. If your group submitted a draft of the Research Design Plan and Usability Test materials for instructor review, please send them to me via WebCampus email. I will comment on them and get them back to you ASAP. 

As I noted on Monday, this is a slower week — no new readings, quizzes or discussions — and you should be using your time to recruit usability test participants and/or wrapping up/revising your Research Design Plan.

Dr. Staggers

I’m back and catching up. If you have materials (your team’s Research Design Plan and Usability Test materials for optional instructor review and/or final draft of your Instructions) that you haven’t turned in yet that you plan to turn in within the next day or so, drop me a line to let me know what you have outstanding and when I should expect it.

I’ll work on getting you feedback on your design plans/test materials ASAP — I’m shooting for Wednesday evening; after that I’ll get your Instructions projects graded. I’m excited about seeing them; you have some interesting projects.

Once I see where we’re at, I’ll get a more formal game plan together for this week. Big picture, though, is this: If your team did not turn in materials for instructor review, you should use this week to finalize your Research Design Plan and Usability Test materials; all teams should also be rounding up participants for your usability tests. Each team will need to conduct all of their usability tests next week, so each team will need at least five test subjects.

If you’re looking to work ahead, you might want to get started on the textbook readings for the next phases of the project.

• Chapter 17 will help you write the Progress Report (due after you’ve completed Usability Testing)
• Chapter 18 will help you write the Usability Recommendation Report (the main final report for this project)
• Chapter 21 will help you write the Oral Presentation

That’s it for today.

Dr.  S.

I’m at a conference this week, but I’ll be checking in daily. Post questions here or send via WebCampus email in a pinch.

The skinny on the WebCampus chaos is this: Random individuals cannot access the Designing Research Learning Module or submit Assignments through the Assignments tab. This is apparently related to the problem we were having a week ago. WebCampus has a trouble ticket and is working on the issue. So far, I know that Mike S., Justin, and Kevin have had this problem. If you’re also experiencing difficulty, let me know via WebCampus email, so I can forward your name/issue to the troubleshooting team.

To cut down on the chaos and confusion, I will not post anything new in WebCampus this week. (So Mike S. and anyone else who is being driven crazy by the “new” icons in the system, feel free to ignore them. Unless you’re getting email or discussion posts from your teammates, there won’t be anything new in the system this week.) Also, feel free to submit any/all work via WebCampus email if you’re getting errors with the Assignment tab.

As for actual business… this is basically a work week. There are no new assigned readings, quizzes, or discussion. Here’s what you do need to get done:

1. If you haven’t already done so, submit your Usability Test memo ASAP. See the assignment for details.
2. Revise your Instructions based on the results of your user tests and submit your final draft by midnight on Sunday. If you can’t make the Assignment feature work (keep getting the System Exception message? let me know), you can send it to me directly via WebCampus email.
3. Work with your team members to get a draft of your Research Design Plan memo and your Usability Test Protocol pulled together if you want an optional instructor review. Participating in the Instructor Review for this particular phase of the project is a really good idea, because if your project is headed off the rails I can help you get it back on track. Projects usually go awry because the usability tests you’ve designed won’t really measure the things you’re trying to measure. If you submit both a draft memo and draft test protocal, I can usually give you some solid advice on where/how to tweak so that your tests will yield lots of useful data.One strategy that’s worked for many teams in the past has been for everyone on the team to discuss the project and come to a consensus about the main issues that need to be addressed in the research design. Then 1 or more people can go off and do a draft of the Research Design Memo and 1 or more other people can develop the drafts of your testing instruments. Remember, for these test protocols, you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel. Several teams in the past have adapted that sample test protocol from Xerox that I gave you with great success (note that this sample is lacking pre-test questions that you definitely need to have). Also, the Usability Toolkit and Usability.gov have loads of forms, templates, models, etc. that you might able to adapt. You won’t be graded down for appropriately adapting/using industry standard models; the whole point of the project is to find ways to come up with efficient and effective tests that measure what you need to measure.If you happen to be working with a website where the chief problem seems to be that the site is huge and crazy disorganized, you might want to try doing a card-sorting test. The Usability.gov site has more information and advice if you’re interested.

   Also, if you’re team is just stumped about what to test or how to test it, feel free to throw questions at me here. I’m happy to advise.

That’s it on this end for today. I think we’re covered for the week in terms of course content, so I won’t post another daily message this week (unless there’s some major issue that needs troubleshooting). I will answer any/all questions and comments here as they arise — I’ll just post Comments responding to your Comments.

Hang in there. Have a good week.

Dr. S.

We have roughly 16,000 problems with WebCampus at present. I’m working on resolving them or coming up with some work-arounds. I’ll have an update for you on Tuesday morning. In the meantime, your mission this week is to wrap up those individual Instructions Projects, and get a jump on the Research Design Plan memo and Usability Test for the group project.

In the meantime, you all still need access to the materials for the Research Design Learning Module…

If you check your WebCampus email, you’ll find a message that has all of the files you’ll need for the Designing Research module. I’ve attached them to the email as a zip file. Just click on the zip file  to open it and download the documents to your favorite computer. You’ll find all of the readings, assignments, and samples you’ll need inside. The only things that are not included in the file are Quiz 6, (which you should be able to get to directly from the Assignments tab), and these links to some online resources you might find helpful:

• Excellent Example of a Test Protocol (test materials)
• Usability Toolkit (lots of samples/models here)
• Usability.gov (loads of samples, ideas for your own tests)
• Sample: An Online Usability Report by Jakob Nielsen

 As you wrap up work on the Instructions Project and start to turn your attention to the group project, you may find that you’re a little frustrated at first. Getting the group project off the ground is actually the hardest part of the whole class. Once your group is up and running, the project is actually kind of interesting, challenging and fun. Most students say they finish the project having learned a lot about how to work with an online team.

If your team is hitting snags or bumps at the getting up and organized stage, feel free to call on me. I have lots of tips, tricks, and strategies that have worked for other teams in the past, and I’m more than happy to help you troubleshoot/negotiate the process of getting the project off the launchpad.

Dr. S.