158.360
Computer Graphics and User Experience Design
Assignment 1 (UXD) 2014
Worth:
Due:
Penalty per day late:
30%
4 April
1 mark
Monkhouse Publishing, after the death of its last illuminator, and having exhausted its apparently
inexhaustible supply of vellum1, has recently stumbled, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, into the
twenty-first century. The company CEO, Ryan Ernest Vaughan Abbot, has discovered the existence of
computers, and wishes to “computerise” all aspects of the business, starting with the Scriptorium,
the section of the business responsible for the overall process of converting authors’ illiterate
maunderings into beautifully presented literary pearls. One of the subsections of the Scriptorium is
the Proofing Group, which is responsible for ironing out authors’ literary solecisms. In the old days,
“ironing” was taken literally, and a pair of proofing irons still hangs on the wall of the Scriptorium,
near the furnace, but nowadays, the word is usually interpreted in a more metaphorical manner.
The Rev has asked you to work with a group of like-minded individuals who will design an interface
for a software system that will support the proofing phase of book production. He is, of course, a
stickler for the old-fashioned virtues of grammar and spelling, and the Proofing Group has
accumulated a number of rules about the house style, collectively called the Tips. As a
demonstration that he takes the whole thing very seriously, he has posted the following on the
Scriptorium tea-room noticeboard, in the mistaken belief that it was a genuine news item:
The ability to spot a minor grammatical error is proof that you are amazing, it has been
confirmed. Researchers at the Institute for Studies found that people who loudly exclaim
about apostrophes and “who versus whom” are actually better than everyone else.
Professor Henry Brubaker said: “In no way are any of these people vain … pedants. Grammar
perfectionists are both intellectually and morally superior to other types of human. The way
that they selflessly dedicate themselves to correct punctuation, for example by pointing out
to the staff at a chip shop why the term ‘chip’s’ is a sloppy obfuscation, confirms they are
bold and righteous individuals. If grammar people just learned to let things go sometimes,
where would we be as a civilisation? Just fighting in the mud, probably.”
www.thedailymash.co.uk/
The PG Tips are long-winded and grammatically obscure – unlike the rest of this document – so here
is a summary of some of the more important ones.
1
The purchasing officer wrote out an order for 2000 Hides, enough for two years, not realising that a Hide –
with an upper case H – was the technical term for a ream of hides – with a lower case h – that is, 500 hides. In
other words, he ordered enough vellum for 1000 years. Most of the calves in Europe gave up their lives that
year, because of his mistake, and the Monkhouse had to sell its precious 4 th Century bible three times over to
unsuspecting and geographically remote purchasers, to pay for the skins, and a scattering of rat-proof
warehouses big enough to store them.
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The author-proofer relationship is largely based on the transfer back and forth of large
documents full of annotations.
Within a document, the units of text that the proofers deal with are sometimes words,
sometimes phrases, sometimes sentences, sometimes paragraphs, and occasionally multipage sections.
Proofers repeatedly find themselves giving the same standardised pieces of advice to the
idiots who imagine they can write, to correct elementary errors like
run-on sentences, (“There’s a rip here, go swimming further down the beach.”)
dangling participles (“Running around the corner, the Town Hall came into sight.”)
subject-verb agreement (“I runs four kilometres every morning before breakfast.”)
The number of such standard pieces of advice is rather large, and they fall into various
categories.
Proofers are responsible for ensuring that the order of sentences in a paragraph acts as a
logical argument that supports whatever half-baked idea the author is trying to foist upon
the unsuspecting readers2.
The proofers can require that some corrections are made, and can actually make them, but
the nature of the corrections must be apparent to the author, who may then be fool, and
foolhardy, enough to suggest some alternative “improvement.”
Proofers can make non-binding suggestions about improvements to the author’s style.
It’s useful sometimes to be able to compare earlier and later versions of a piece of text, to
show how much it has improved, and to remind authors of how many attempts it took them
to turn it into its final, polished state.
The Rev is not trying to put the proofers out of a job. The decisions about what should be done to an
author’s precious writing (and possibly a precious author’s writing) are not going to be handed over
to a soulless computer. Instead, his ambition for the proofing software is that it should act as a
support system that will make it easier for his proofers to carry out their duties, and easier for his
authors to understand the proposals that the proofers have made, and to incorporate them into
their writing (or, if they are particularly naïve or courageous, to reject them).
He has lined up a team of crack programmers (not, none of them are on crack); what he needs now
is an interface for them to implement that will make these features available to a proofer and an
author, and will make them feel they have never before encountered a piece of software that so
perfectly matches their needs; he also suggests that you would do well3 not to waste your time and
his money designing the data model (he’s picking up the jargon, you see), and after reading a single
textbook on the topic, he knows all about interface guidelines, so he doesn’t want to see those
served up as an anodyne alternative to some concepts that really address the problem.
In spite of the comment about not wasting money, he is not too concerned if implementing the
resulting system turns out to be a major task; Monkhouse Publishing has a significant secondary
income from its vast network of empty warehouses, and can afford to hire the best. But any
2
Proofreaders refrain from using such judgemental language when communicating with authors. With some
difficulty, in most cases.
3
When the Rev suggests that someone would do well to do something, he is apt to glance wistfully at the
proofing irons, and he usually get his way.
suggestions need to be feasible. He doesn’t specify where the boundary between feasibility and
infeasibility is, but he says, with a leer, that he’ll recognise it when he sees it.
The Rev has made the comment, in passing, that proofers will use the proofing system frequently,
and they can be expected to become expert users quite quickly, so greater emphasis should be
placed on minimising the effort required to access common interface functions than on making the
environment comfortable and easy to learn for casual users. That isn’t to say that casual users
should find the interface uncomfortable and hard to learn – just that catering to casual users should
not compromise efficiency of use.
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Your brief is to design an interface for such a system.
There are to be four phases to this design process;
a conceptual exploration, in which each member of the group puts forward her or his ideas
[7.5 marks]
a conceptual description of the system, which consolidates the ideas from the conceptual
exploration phase
[7.5 marks]
a set of Essential Use Cases that demonstrate ways of using the system
[7.5 marks]
a prototype, using whatever technology you think works best for this problem
[7.5 marks]
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Your group should work sequentially through the four phases (as in the practical project), but
there is no requirement that each phase should take a week, and you should make a single
submission on or before the due date that contains all four components.
The components should be clearly distinguished (if you submit only a conceptual exploration or
only a conceptual description, for example, you will only receive marks for the one you have
submitted).
As with the practical project, the conceptual exploration should clearly identify the individual
contributors, so that I can mark that section of the submission individually.