CSE 8316 (Spring 2018): Course Project
Assignment
Your project is an integral part of your learning experience in
CSE 8316. It will consist of three parts/stages:
-
A project proposal:
due on 2/27/18 for on-campus students and 3/1/18 for distance students.
-
A project summary
due on 4/17/18 for on-campus students and 4/19/18 for distance students
or an optional (formal) project presentation
to be scheduled for the last 4 classes (4/11, 4/18, 4/25, or 5/2).
-
A final project report:
due on 4/24/18 for on-campus students and 4/26/18 for distance students.
It can be either an individual project or
a comprehensive group project.
The details are given below.
Acceptable project types
The project should be an application of some specific
UI design and/or evaluation techniques/models
for a new or existing program/product/application/service/etc.
Your project should include several of the following important elements:
-
Usability requirements through ethnographic studies or other
requirement elicitation/gathering techniques.
-
Initial design through rapid contextual design or other UI design techniques,
and follow-up design evaluation-and-refinement cycles following
user-centered design (UCD), participatory design (PD), or other
UI design processes and related techniques..
-
Choice of appropriate interaction styles and detailed design decisions
with justification.
-
Implementation of the UI design.
-
Evaluation (of implementation and/or design)
through expert reviews or usability testing,
or other related usability evaluation techniques.
Pay particular attention to your concerete, and ideally some
quantitative, usability metrics to be used for evaluation.
-
Identification of problems for further usability improvement
and/or for process improvement.
-
Followup improvement cycles as a second (and third, and ...) iteration
of some of the above steps.
The most important elements are the design and evaluation
activities performed by you.
An acceptable project must include at least one of these
elements and related activities, and preferable both.
However, for a group project,
both the design and evaluation aspects must be included.
In addition, more elements among the above and larger system
and more elaborated design/implementation/evaluation/repeating-the-cycle
activities should be included,
appropriate for the group.
The group size of 3 or more needs special approval from the instructor.
Several other considerations are also listed below:
-
It's generally a good idea to consider design techniques,
evaluation methods, and interaction styles
and actually use a couple from each category in your project
to get a hands-on feeling
of how different techniques, styles and methods work
in practical applications.
-
Try to be as specific as possible in each of your activities.
For example, when you evaluate the usability of your system,
consider:
- What is/are your specific technique(s)?
- How about other techniques that might be appropriate?
- What's the basis for comparison (baseline)?
- What usability metrics are to be used?
Most importantly, it's a project where you design/implement/evaluate
UI for some system.
Therefore, a general discussion of or even a comprehensive survey about
UID and related topics and activities will not be an acceptable project.
Project proposals
Your project proposal should be around 3-4 double spaced pages
in length, and should include the following information:
- a one-paragraph abstract (at the beginning of the proposal) to give
a high-level overview or executive summary of the whole project,
- introduction: clearly identify the problem that you are going to address,
- brief background information (about 1/2 or 1 page),
- a well-justified solution strategy you intend to use
(most importantly:
which design/evaluation technique? which interaction style? etc., and why?),
- expected results and related analysis to be performed,
- followup actions,
- a rough schedule,
- indicate whether you'll be making a project presentation,
and, if possible, your preferred presentation date.
In case of a group project, please also pay attention to the following:
-
Please provide information regarding each team member's
roles and responsibilities.
-
The amount of work proposed for a group project should be appropriate
for the group size. As a general rule of thumb, if something can be
comfortably done by a single student, it is not suitable as a group
project.
-
You only need to submit one proposal and one report for the project
by one team member,
with the others submitting a note or a link giving information
about who is the submitter of the team.
The proposal and report must
follow the same instruction as the individual projects.
Please keep in mind that by the time you submit your project proposal,
we have only covered less than half of the class material,
although an overview of the whole course is given at the beginning of
the semester.
Therefore,
you may make certain modifications to the things you propose,
but the basic framework should be there in your proposal.
Once I have reviewed your proposal and provided my feedback,
you need to address the issues I raised in your final project report.
However, in most of the cases,
you do NOT need to submit a revised proposal.
In the rare case that your proposal is marked as "unacceptable"
(grade of 0/1),
I'll explicitly ask you to re-do/re-submit your proposal.
Project summary or presentation? The choice is yours
You are required to submit a project summary,
in presentation slide format (around 5 slides),
if you are not doing a full presentation (see below) in class.
You summary should focus on the main results from your project
for us to get the basic picture.
You are highly encouraged to do a (full) project presentation.
In that case, you don't need to submit the project summary.
Each presentation should last about 10-15 minutes,
with appropriate numbers of slides.
You need to highlight the problem/solution-strategy/results/analysis
for us to get the basic picture,
but not necessarily all the details,
which would require much more than 15 minutes.
One common mistake in the past is too much background information
but not enough UI design/evaluation technical information.
Project report
The project report should be around 15 double-spaced pages in length,
but no longer than 20 pages for individual projects
and 30 pages for group projects.
The report should clearly and comprehensively states the background,
problem, strategy, activities, results, result analysis,
lessons learned, followup actions, and a high level summary
(and an abstract at the beginning).
Additional material, such as graphs, models, etc. produced,
information sources and raw data,
customer surveys, etc., can be included in the appendix and clearly
marked as such (so it will not be counted towards your 20 or 30 page quota).
Several common mistakes to avoid:
-
It is supposed to be a "report",
not a set of "presentation slides".
So, limit your use of lists/bullets, and put most of the material/discussions
in paragraphs.
Similarly,
only figures and tables without corresponding discussions
do not make a good report.
-
Your project report must contain UI design/evaluation related technical
information.
In addition,
you need to describe/discuss this information unless it is
clearly self-explanatory.
-
On the other hand,
you shouldn't include all the graphs, models, etc. produced
for the project in the report text itself.
As I mentioned above, they can be included in the appendix, if you desire,
together with other material, such as raw data,
customer surveys, etc.
Most importantly, it's a report about what you did in UI design
(and implementation) and/or evaluation yourself.
Therefore, a general discussion of or even a comprehensive survey about
UID and related topics/activities will not be suitable.
(An unacceptable project. See "acceptable project types" earlier.)
Prepared by Jeff Tian
(tian@engr.smu.edu).
Posted: Jan. 24, 2018.
Last update: Jan. 24, 2018.