Shaun Kelly | HCI Capstone 2013
Milestone 1 — The Idea
Yard Genius is an application to help homeowners maintain their yards by keeping track of maintenance tasks and suggesting appropriate plants and vegetation based on the user’s context.
The main user group for the system will be homeowners with yards and gardens to maintain. Users who will benefit most from the application are those with limited experience and knowledge about yard and garden maintenance.
This document contains the original project proposal.
Milestone 2 — Understanding the Problem
Before beginning the design process, I undertook initial research to better understand the problem. During this phase, I interviewed three prospective users to understand more about the user group and their needs.
The three main tasks for the application identified during user research are:
- Determining suitable plants for a given location
- Determining which tasks (planting, mowing, fertilizing, pruning, etc.) are required based on what items are planted
- Design a pleasing layout for plants in the yard
This document describes the findings from this research.
Milestone 3 — The Design
After completing user research in milestone 2, I created initial requirements, information flow, and design sketches of the proposed application.
Some of the challenges of the design included:
- Updating based on the user's context
- Providing a tablet application to balance portability and screen real estate
- Determining whether to focus on to-do items or yard layout
- Not providing an overwhelming amount of information
- Using consistency to increase learnability
- Providing rich interactions to allow users to plan their landscape
This milestone also includes a discussions of the relevant emerging technologies and social implications of this project from an academic perspective.
Milestone 4 — The Prototype
I created an interactive prototype of the Yard Genius iPad application using HTML/CSS/JavaScript and the jQuery and Twitter Bootstrap frameworks. I chose a mixed fidelity, interactive prototype developed in HTML in order to best test the interactions of the application with my users.
The prototype is available below (best viewed on an iPad).
The milestone document discusses my rationale for the prototyping process I chose.
Milestone 5 — Evaluation
I developed a usability test plan to identify issues in the prototype I developed in milestone 4. I conducted the usability test on four users.
Some key issues discovered:
- Poor iconography for weather page
- Needing better affordances for to-do items
- Users preferred touch and place to drag and drop for interacting with the layout
- Users were confused when interacting with the calendar
- Users did not understand that the application inferred to do items based on context
The milestone 5 document presents the complete quantitative and qualitative results, including recommendations for updates to the application.