Week 13: Presentation Work

I'd like to start out by saying I got an actual shiver of excitement this morning when I realized that three weeks from today, I will be DONE with school. It has been nearly four years since I first started getting stuff together to apply to grad school and studying for the GRE. At times, it felt like this was never going to happen, that I was never going to finish. I still don't know what I'm going to do next but at least it will be a new chapter.

So this week I have been preparing my final deliverable: a PowerPoint presentation on my findings. I have had to remind myself that unlike what I write about here and what my Capstone poster will contain, this presentation is not so much about my project as it is about the product I was trying to improve. While there will be some overlap between the contents of my presentation and my poster, they are for different audiences and have different purposes. I have been trying to work on both somewhat in parallel—as far as getting the information together that I want to use—but I have to be very aware about telling two stories.

The presentation is going to be more focused on the usability study, the tasks run, comments and video clips of tasks and the results of testing. I think OT is more interested in whether the design suggestions I came up with are worth pursing in the next version of the product. My poster will be more concerned with the overall project and will likely focus more on the design decisions I made, with metrics from the study being presented only as a snapshot of the usability portion of the study. I started out by creating an outline of what I wanted to put into my presentation:

1. Introduction
2. Usability Concerns
1. Picker models are inconsistent
2. Selecting multiple objects is confusing
3. Icon for removing selections is unclear
4. Channel selection model is counter intuitive
3. Designs
1. Single Container Picker
2. Multiple Containers Picker
3. Single Content Item Picker
4. Multiple Content Items Picker
4. Evaluations
1. Participants
2. Tools
3. Testing
1. Comments/Videos for each task (9)
5. Results
1. Satisfaction (SUS)
2. Effectiveness
3. SEQ
4. Efficiency
5. Time on Task
6. Appearance
7. Scorecard
6. Recommendations

I have tried to compile all this information into my document, filling out the outline as it were so that next week I can focus on making sure things are in the right order, adding in any animations I might need, and so forth. It has been more work than I though it would be. That is, I think creating a polished, interesting presentation is harder than writing up a formal report. Part of what has been time consuming is going back through the recordings of my testing sessions to pull quotes and to create short video clips (I'm only including three). I think the clips will be especially helpful for demonstrating possible problem areas.

I am also still grappling with some of the terminology and meanings around the statistical data. I don't think I need to understand the ins and outs of every calculation but I would at least like to be able to speak to the major figures I am presenting. I read up on error bars and geometric means and Tanya loaned me a book, Measuring the User Experience, that I found helpful for a couple of reasons. I was struggling to understand what "efficiency" is measuring, how it is calculated since it takes into account only successes, time on task and benchmark times by an expert; the book gave me this explanation: the core measure of efficiency is the ratio of the task completion rate to the mean time per task. Ah! I can at least tell other people that.

About 3am Wednesday morning, I woke up with an idea for how to layout my poster.

My half-asleep sketch of a possible Capstone poster layout

There is just so much information I could include that I need to be careful not to overload the space. My biggest concern is being able to adequately demonstrate my design ideas since I have four permutations.  I think I might end up showing just the two multiple picker designs and indicating that the checkboxes would not be used for the single picker designs. We'll see.