For each module a list of project activities is planned. These activities can be completed with the information provided in the lectures and the papers on Blackboard. Some project activities include so-called milestones. These milestones give groups the opportunity to present their progress thus far.

Students will design an ‘Intelligent Virtual Agent’ (IVA) by following and applying methods and theories about scenario-based development given in the weekly lectures and the provided literature. Not only the development of the actual application is important, but also the experience users have by interacting with this agent. The aim of this project assignment is to give students the chance to understand and get a feel of both the development and the evaluation of such an application.

The development phase consists of several steps, divided among the different modules of the 3rd quarter. One such step is the creation of a poster presentation of the envisioned application. By doing this the whole group needs to think out a whole scenario, together with use cases, core functions and a claims analysis. Afterwards, every group has to pick out one aspect of this scenario and implement a prototype. Before the end of this quarter, every group needs to present this prototype, together with a test plan.

A pilot test can be conducted in the 2nd week of 4th quarter (around module 9). Groups may encounter unforeseen errors or behaviour while evaluating their prototype in this stage and it’s therefore necessary to improve the prototype before the ‘real’ evaluation can begin.

Every student group will come in contact with the following:

•    Task analysis, as well as domain and support analysis and theory about human factors
•    Creating a scenario, applying the claims analysis and making use cases
•    Selecting and creating a prototype of a specific aspect of the scenario
•    Defining a test plan for the actual experiment and evaluation
•    Interpreting and analyzing the results

To make sure every group is up to par with the project assignment, several milestones are introduced. These milestones can be seen as steps in both the development as the evaluation phases.

Each group has to select a paper that focuses on a key theoretical of the envisioned application,which addresses relevant cognitive, affective and/or social aspects of thehuman-computer interaction. The group has to give a presentation on the paperduring the lecture, according to the following structure: 

Summary paper itself Conclusions Personal remarks (“position statement”) 20 minutes (max)Discussion, relation with own prototype 10 minutes (min)

Each group should give a presentation of the paper they selected in the first module.

Examples of the second milestone. Each group has to present a poster containing the following:
Core functionsScenarios and use casesClaims (Persona)

The test plan should describe the following elements:
•    Objective (cf. formative/summative evaluation)
•    Participants (expert/novice, pay-off ratio, design for all)
•    Tasks
•    Procedure (preparation, introduction, test, debriefing)
•    User experience measures (effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction; e.g. trust, emotion,  situation
      awareness)  
•    Pilot
•    Setting (in lab/on location)
•    Data analysis
•    Report and presentation

One person of each group should prepare a presentation and tell something about the results of the conducted pilot test. This presentation should be very short, explaining just the results, the problems and possible ways of solving them. Again, there is still time to finalize the prototype which should be 100% ready for evaluation in module 11.

The final report should provide a concise and coherent description of the design and evaluation results:
1.    Summary
2.    Introduction
3.    Design
a.    Work Domain and Support analysis
b.    Design rationale and (high-level) requirements
c.    Prototype
4.    Evaluation
a.    Method
b.    Results
c.    Conclusions
5.    General discussion
6.    References