CS 422 - Project: Exhibit Interface

This project will be done in multiple parts. All of these parts will be done as a group. It is expected that each group will consist of three members. The grade for all group members for each part will be the same. The parts will be:

Project Part	Due Date	Points
Sketch Phase	Wednesday March 10, 2004 at 11:59 pm	100 pts
Critique Phase	Wednesday March 17, 2004 at 11:59 pm	50 pts X 2
Critique Follow-Up Phase	Wednesday March 31, 2004 at 11:59 pm	30 pts
Implementation Phase 1	~~Wednesday April 14, 2004~~ at 11:59 pm Friday April 16, 2004	70 pts
Implementation Phase 2	Wednesday April 28, 2004 at 11:59 pm	100 pts

The project will have the group creating a user interface to display information about some "living exhibit". An example of a living exhibit is an exhibit at some zoo or botanical garden. Specific examples might include:

The Wild Reef exhibit at the Shedd Aquarium
The Bear Habitat at Lincoln Park Zoo
The Swamp at Brookfield Zoo
The McDonald Woods at the Chicago Botanic Gardens
The Fragrance Garden at the Morton Arboretum
The Butterfly Haven at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

Your interface must have 10 separate pages (including an introduction/link page), so the exhibit must be large enough to generate 9 different points of interest. Each point of interest could be a different animal/plant or unique display item (such as the "tracking station" in Habitat Africa at Brookfield Zoo). The interface is to have a uniform look and feel from one page to the next. The navigation from page to page should also be integrated into the design of the interface.

Your user interface should feel as part of the exhibit. Most of these exhibits have some special design theme encorporated into the exhibit. Your user interface should also encorporate this special design theme. Your group should go visit the exhibit you are choosing to get a feel of the exhibit. Note that the instructor has been to most of the living exhibits in the Chicago area and could tell if your group has indeed visited the exhibit or meerly read about it on the internet.

The final implementation ("Implementation Phase 2") is to be a working java application that will be submitted electronically via the turnin command using the project name of phase2.

The Sketch Phase

The "Sketch Phase" is to be submitted via Sketch Phase Discussion Board in Blackboard. You are first to include a discussion of the overall exhibit, why you chose it, what unifying theme will be present through-out your interface, what does your interface add to the existing exhibit. You are then to include a discussion of all 10 pages in your interface. For each page you are to list what information the user will be presented, how the user can intereact with this information and what the user can do with this page. You are also to address what aspects of the pages design fit into the overall theme of the interface. Finally you are to include a discussion of 5 pages that were rejected by your group. These pages should also show what information the user would be presented with and how the user would have interacted with this page. The discussion with these pages should reflect the reasons why the page was rejected and what information was salvaged from the page and encorporated into the 10 pages that you are planning on using. If your group cannot produce at least 5 pages that were rejected, it will then be assumed that your group simply agreed to use the first ideas were thought up and that your group was unable to critique its own ideas.

The easiest way to complete the "Sketch Phase" is to have all members of the group create the ten pages of your interface independently. Then meet together and discuss each of the designs. There will be some similar ideas among the individual designs which will probably be encorporated into the final design. There will also be ideas that will be discarded in favor of some idea by another member of the group. Also there will be ideas that result from merging the ideas of two or more members of the group. The "rejected" pages portion of the discussion board report is to reflect how the group arrived at their final design idea.

In the discussion board report, you may include scanned images of the initial pen-and-paper drawings. However, the 10 pages of the final design should be shown using some computer generated drawing tool.

The Critique Phase

The "Critique Phase" will have each group write a report on two other group's Sketch Phase design. This report should include ideas on the good parts of the design, the bad parts of the design and those parts that are "OK". Each report will be submitted to the discussion board as a reply to the original Sketch Phase report.

The Critique Follow-Up

After each group has recieved the critiques on its Sketch Phase design, they are to write a follow-up report that will address the ideas in both critiques and how they indent to use these ideas in the final implementation. This report is to be submitted as a reply to the groups original Sketch Phase report.

Implementation Phase 1

The first implementation will expect that the primary page and three of the other pages are fully functional. The remaining pages should have some "Next Page Goes Here" message displayed when your would navigate to those pages. This implementation is to be done in java and to ge submitted electronically via turnin using the project name phase1.