I’m a rockstar. This quarter I only had one class, but the whole class was basically one long group project with lots of deliverables. The idea was to create a product that doesn’t exist in the market yet today, that is a significant improvement over what is available now, specifically in terms of user experience and ease of use. It is basically a course on usability, so whatever we designed had to be focused on the user.
In any case, our final three deliverables were: a prototype; a poster, and a binder. The binder just had copies of everything we had done through the quarter in it, and looked good. Easy. The poster was for the trade show where we showcased our product and prototype. I designed it and put it all together. Some of the text was written by my group members, but all of it was edited to work better on the poster by myself. The prototype could have been as simple as a series of printed pictures that gave an idea of what the product did and how it worked. My group’s prototype (and by my group, I mean mine, since I didn’t 90% of the work) was an almost fully functional mock interface built in Flash. Well above and beyond what was required. You can check it out at http://www.jbsil.com/class/426/BlendProto.html if you want.
The Faux Trade Show was instead of our final exam. All three sections of the class from this quarter met at the same time and set up displays for their poster and prototype. Everyone got a piece of paper where they could grade each of the groups in three subjects, from A-F: Poster, Prototype and “I want this to be true.” Also, everyone was able to grade each of their group members in a peer evaluation. Here are my grades and the teachers comments for the entire quarter (only Prototype and Poster comments included):
Heuristic Evaluation: 100%
Design Document: 100%
Usability Tests: 100%
Prototype: 100%
Comment: “fabulous. it is as close (closer) to a real working prototype as any in the show (with the possible exception of mogo, but yours is waaaaaay more complex). looks, functionality, usability: all top notch. little wonder that it took FIRST PLACE in the assessment of project category at the faux trade fair (see graph that i sent you (or will soon)).”
Poster: 100%
Comment: “excellent. classy and professional feeling. good mix of image and text; viewers can get a strong sense of what the device does … and how it does it. little wonder that it took FIRST PLACE in the assessment of poster category at the faux trade fair. 
oh, by the way, you also took FIRST PLACE in the “i want this to be true” category. so you took gold in all categories. not bad considering one class was grad students and one was taught by a professor who’s been teaching this for 5+ years. congratulations! don’t forget me when you’re rich and famous! ”
Peer Evaluation: 100%
Cumulative grade for the class: 100/100
For those playing the home game, this was also the last class required for my degree. Oh, and don’t forget my full-course-load 4.0 from last quarter. Talk about a big finish…