Electronic Attendance System Overview

In the fall of 2008, my colleagues and I designed a product for a human computer interactions course at
the University of Toronto. The following is the course overview taken from CSC318: The Design of
Interactive Computational Media taught by Professor Khai Truong.

Course Overview
The focus of this course is on the design of interactive computational media that enhance and support
the cognitive, communication, and creative processes of their users, and on user interface design for
computational media. Throughout the course, students will work in groups of three-four on a project to
apply user centered, iterative design of prototypes of computational tools appropriate to the needs of a
specified user group. Students will learn about users & conceive, design, prototype, and evaluate a
design.
Objectives:
1. to provide the future user interface designer with concepts and strategies for making design
decisions
2. to expose the future user interface designer to tools, techniques, and ideas for interface design
3. to introduce the student to the literature of human-computer interaction
4. to stress the importance of good user interface design
5. To work in multidisciplinary design teams

My team and I designed an electronic attendance system suitably named Electronic Attendance System
(EAS). The team was composed of Joseph Ng Chow, Veronica Wong, Victoria Mui, and myself. We first
decided to tackle a problem that we had seen firsthand in schools. All schools in the Toronto District
School Board were using a common bubble sheet template on which the teacher would mark down the
students that were absent. We were concerned about the amount of time used and the efficiency of
filling out these sheets. Also, we thought that having students take the sheets down to the main office
could be a chance for misbehaviour. At the time, there also was a current issue in schools regarding
armed intruders entering the grounds. We wanted to try and implement something that may be useful
in one of these situations.

We began our study gathering data from the end users of our potential product, teachers. Afterwards,
my team and I developed personas and placed them in scenarios best describing their user needs. From
this, we obtained design requirements that were converted into a paper prototype combining what we
saw as the most important aspects. Finally, we evaluated our prototype using common Human
Computer Interaction principles such as a heuristic evaluation, a cognitive walkthrough and usability
tests. As well, using summary statistics from the evaluation data, we applied a few statistical testing
techniques to further analyze the results. At the end of the course, we learned from our initial design
and were ready to advance to the next stage.