After the chats, I think everyone understands the project better. I will summarize my responses here. This has been a good exercise in using Web 2.0 and in dealing with pofessional clients that are sometimes vague and slow to respond. (This is the first time I've used this project, so it is hard to anticipate questions and concerns.) Categories have also been updated. If you haven't already, please send me your group name so I can add it to the Project Three Groups category.

Something you might also use is Adobe Connect. Purdue has a licence for the program, and anyone can use it if they have a free Flash player. Purdue's even used as a success story by Adobe. You can use it for online meetings, and also use it for screen capture. (I think you are supposed to have access to this as Distance Ed students. If not, I can set up meetings through my account for you to use. Thanks)

Client Contact Email

Some groups said that seeing other groups emails would help them with their own. In general, the contact email should include a brief introduction and your purpose, your possible softwares, and some questions on their needs and willingness to work with you. Please post a draft of this email as soon as possible

Proposal - Draft: April 7 - Final: April 11

This should include information on your group, your client, your software, and the division of work. You should also try to determine how you'll develop the user documentation and multimedia presentaiton. This should be at least 500 words, and probably closer to 750 or 1000. Use headings and short paragraphs. Work on sentence variety and active verbs.

Individual Usability Study - Draft: April 7 - Completed Final: April 14

Each group member will develop their own usability study and complete. This can be questions with answers or scales, guidelines, or any other means. Ultimately, you want to use the software and gather information on how your client might use it. Anticipate their concerns with your study and respond to those. A strong final draft should include a summary...

Usability Report - Final: April 18

...because that will produce the bulk of what needs to be in the report. Groups can combine their individual summaries and revise for redundancy. The Usability Report should summarize your findings and forecast what needs to go into the user documentation and multimedia presentation. Use headings and short paragraphs. Work on sentence variety and active verbs.

User Documentation and Multimedia Presentation - Draft: April 23; Final - April 28 30

Groups will need to use the proposal and the usability report to determine exactly what will go into each of these documents. You have many different programs at your disposal for these final deliverables. The user documentation will be very similar to the Instructions you produced in Project Two. The multimedia presentation for Web delivery is straightforward, I think, and will be more like a recommendation or proposal than actual step-by-step instructions.

More than likely, your user documentation will be more text-oriented (with illustrations or screenshots) in Word or PowerPoint. The multimedia presentation should use PowerPoint or Captivate, and should include screenshots at the least, and preferably some screen-capture, some video and some audio. Experiment with the multimedia. Have fun. Be creative and professional.

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