The
Design for All Group
Design
for All Related Student Projects
When
looking for a supervisor, in the first instance try the academics (not
PhD students) whose interests match yours. Contact a member of staff
who you think would be a good supervisor as soon as possible expressing
your interest. However, before meeting the member of staff try to write
a paragraph or so outlining what the aim of the project will be - what
will you implement what will you study. This will give you the basis
of your initial discussion with the potential supervisor. Think also
about how you will go about the project: what language or tools might
you use, how might you collect data, etc. One of the most important
questions is "How will I evaluate the artifact that I create
or the data I collect?" - "How will I demonstrate to
the reader of my dissertation that the work I have done is good?".
For a computer science project you must of course create some computing
artefact as part of the project.
Do
not put a member of staff's name down on your proposal as your supervisor
without getting their agreement first. If nothing else it is rude,
but in any case is not in your best interests as your proposal will
be far better if you have discussed it with the actual supervisor- they
will help you improve it. None of the suggestions below are proposals
themselves, just ideas to get you started.
Suggestions
for Student Projects related to the research undertaken by members of
the Design for All Group will be placed below. However these are intended
to just give you an idea of the kind of project you might do. Use your
imagination! The most important thing is that you do a project that
excites you.
Some
of the suggestions below are more suited for Undergraduate projects
and some for Masters projects. However, it is likely that suggestions
in either category could be turned into excellent projects in the other.
For example, the scope of a Masters suggestion might be scaled down
to give an undergraduate project on the same topic.
Project Suggestions
An
accessible personal web page designer
There
are a variety of tools available on the internet for evaluating the
accessibility of web pages (ie answering "Is it usable by a
wide range of users, including people with disabilities, older people,
etc?"). The tools analyse a web page automatically and provide
a report listing usability problems and changes to be made to improve
the accessibility of the web page. A problem is that the recommendations
returned are often unintelligible except by usability experts. However,
many people who are not experts design web pages (eg personal pages).
This project involves developing an idiot proof such tool, where the
recommendations are comprehensible to everyday people capable of using
design tools such as Dreamweaver. The tool would only be for producing
simple web pages so would not need to support the full functionality
of existing systems. However it must be compliant with W3C guidelines.
This will involve programming in a language such as Java.
Possible Supervisors: Gill
Whitney
Design in context for the older user
This
project is concerned with the implications of contextual design for
the preferences and skills of the older user. It tests the hypothesis
that the older user will find contextually valid activities to be more
acceptable and easier to implement than others. You will design a study
based upon a small set of interviews to identify the real world tasks
that older users for which older users might wish to have support from
information technology. You will evaluate the use of two websites by
your chosen interviewees in order to produce a simple checklist of design
features and evaluate its applicability.
Possible Supervisors: Ray
Adams, Gill Whitney
Design customisation for an older user
On
the basis of an in-depth interview with one older user of information
technology, develop a simple method for assessing the specific requirements
of that person. Develop a simple web page meeting the requirements as
far as possible and perform a user study with the original person. Evaluate
the value of the method developed by means of a second interview with
another older person.
Possible Supervisors: Ray
Adams, Gill Whitney
Online searching for the elderly
The
web has the potential to provide a useful information source for elderly
people. For example local government services are increasingly being
placed online. The aim of this project is to investigate the search
approaches and metaphors used by elderly people when actually searching
for information in a natural environment. For example it may be that
elderly people are used to searching telephone directories. However,
search engines do not use the same search strategies as work for paper
directories. The result of the project would be to develop a search
interface that does match the metaphors underlying the search strategies
actually used.
Possible Supervisors: Gill
Whitney, Suzette Keith
Evaluating Spiral Help
According
to research by Age Concern, as people get older they find it increasingly
hard to remember long instructions. The idea of spiral help is to give
minimal instructions initially, assuming this will be sufficient in
most cases, but then on mistakes, increasingly detailed instructions.
Voice based systems such as a voice recognition booking system (as might
be used for booking tickets over the phone) that give a user a series
of options to respond to can be very frustrating and especially so for
older people. An example of spiral help would be if a spoken instruction
was not recognizable by the system, it give more detailed instructions
to try to recover. If the response of the person was still unrecognizable,
even better help would be given. For example, an initial instruction
might be "What day of the week do you wish to book for?".
On a repeat due to an unrecognized response this might be replaced by
"What day of the week do you wish to book for, Saturday or Sunday?"
then "Do you wish to book for Saturday? Tickets are only available
at weekends" (where it was initially assumed from context that
only weekend tickets were available).
There
are several avenues a project on Spiral help could follow, each involving
developing and evaluating a prototype system. For example, spiral help
could be compared against a more normal approach with repeating the
same instructions, for different age groups, to study whether it is
a better approach. An obvious question is how many times should the
system persist for an answer before giving up? A study using prototypes
could examine how many repeats of instructions on unrecognizable responses
users put up with before giving up themselves? Does this vary with the
point in the interaction - do people give up later if they are further
in the interaction? Do they give up on fewer reprompts if they failed
on earlier questions more times (ie does it depend on the total number
of failures rather than failures on this question). This might be examined
using a Wizard of Oz study where the system itself ignored what the
user actually said but was preprogrammed with different subjects to
"fail to recognize" what the person said.
Further
Reading: M. Zajicek, R. Wales and A. Lee. "Towards VoiceXML
Dialogue Design for Older Adults" in People and Computers XVII
- Designing for Society, edited by E. O'Neill, P. Palanque and P.
Johnson, pp 327-338 BCS, 2003.
Possible
Supervisors: Paul Curzon
DIY Help System
Computer
Systems such as Word are hard to learn. Many people find help systems
do not help very much. A tactic I have observed some older people use
when learning a computer system is to keep a notebook of the things
they have learnt as a memory aid. Study memory aids, both computer based
and physical, that people use when learning a system and determine if
any particular approaches are found to be more useful and/or successful
for different age groups. Design a computer based help system that acts
like the notebook allowing people to create their own help but providing
extra functionality (such as help in searching) - evaluate its effectiveness
against a paper version and against the existing help system provided.
Is paper best? What factors determine the success of such aids.
Possible
Supervisors: Paul Curzon
Rail Ticket Machines
Rail
companies are currently introducing a new generation of ticket machines
designed to give much greater functionality than previous ones. This
project is to investigate any design problems that would make such machines
hard for the disabled and elderly to use and to implement a prototype
design of a ticket machine which avoids the problems identified.
Possible
Supervisors: Paul Curzon
Reaction time
If
people have to respond to a warning signal - e.g. that indicates danger
- they generally respond faster to auditory signals (sounds) than visual
ones. However, in some environments (e.g. poor lighting or noisy environment)
particular sounds or visual signals will not work well. Also, generally,
some signals may be more effective than others - for example, maybe
a sharp sound elicits faster response than a dull one, a red light faster
than a blue one. Or maybe not. The elderly may however be hard of hearing
and many people have minor hearing damage due to for example the use
of walkmans. This project is to study the effects of different stimuli
on reaction time for people of different age groups, to help design
better warning signals.
Method:
- Design
and implement a system that allows you to test reaction times for
different stimuli (various sounds and visual stimuli).
- Run
a simple experiment to check previous results in this area (particularly
that sounds elicit faster responses than visual stimuli).
- Select
variations on the kinds of sounds / visual stimuli, and re-run the
test with those.
Memory and attention game
There
are situations in which people often forget something - for example,
forgetting to attach files to email messages, leaving the original on
the photocopier and going away just with the copies. Many of these situations
share something in common: that the user has achieved what they set
out to do (send a message, make a copy) but in doing so they have altered
something else, which also needs to be returned to its original state.
This project is to investigate what factors most determine when people
are most likely to forget to finish a task properly; they are likely
to include visibility and related cues, distractions or too much to
think about, and the task structure (what order things have to be done
in). Is this something that is affected by age?
Method:
- Design
and implement a game that manipulates all these variables. (The
best idea I've had for this so far is a kind of 'dungeons and dragons'
game with a timed element to it though that may not be very suitable
for the elderly!.)
- Design
and run an experiment that tests the variations of the possible
factors that determine memory load.
Possible
Supervisor: Bob Fields,
Paul Curzon
Interfaces in Public Spaces
Evaluating
and re-designing Interfaces and Websites for a very general audience
in public spaces with the pattern approach. Possible cases: 1) any exhibit
in any Museum that includes a computer. 2) Information kiosks, computerised
vending machines, cash machines
Possible supervisors: Elke
Duncker
Aging
What's
age got to do with it? Designing a fun game for aging people with multiple
disabilities and reduced intellectual capacity.
Possible
supervisors: Elke
Duncker
For
further information please contact the Convenor - Gill Whitney (G.Whitney@mdx.ac.uk).
