CS 8316 (Fall 2020): Course Project
Assignment
Your project is an integral part of your learning experience in
CS 8316. It will consist of three parts/stages:
-
A project proposal:
due on 10/29/21.
-
A project presentation
to be scheduled for the last 2 classes (12/3/21 or 12/10/21),
with the slides due the day before your presentation.
-
A final project report:
due on 12/13/21.
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 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,
typically directly involving the target users.
-
Initial design 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.
(Warning: Don't get bogged down on this!
The focus of your project should be on UID,
not implementation.)
-
Evaluation (of design and/or implementation)
through expert reviews or usability testing,
or other appropriate usability evaluation techniques.
Pay particular attention to your concrete, 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 both these
elements and related activities,
although you may choose to focus on one while only performing
limited activities on the other.
For example:
-
If you choose to focus on design,
such as designing a new system and/or its UI,
at least some evaluation needs to be performed to demonstrate
its usability (and viability).
-
If you choose to focus on the evaluation of an existing system,
(or something you designed/implemented as part of this project),
you still need to have some design elements,
such as design sketches of an improved/modified system/UI
based on your evaluation results.
For a group project,
both the design and evaluation aspects must be extensively covered.
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 multiple 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 evaluation 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 ("do") UI for some system
and report the activities/results/findings/etc.
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:
- an informative title (e.g., "UI Design and Usability Testing of XYZ",
but not "CS 8316 Project"),
- 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 (no more than 1/2 to 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 data to be collected)
and related analysis to be performed,
- followup actions,
- a rough schedule,
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.
We will have an interactive discussion of your proposal ideas
during our 2nd class on 10/29/21,
where I will give you some immediate feedback after your verbal
presentation of your project ideas.
Once I have reviewed your written proposal,
I may provide additional written 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 "unacceptable",
I'll explicitly ask you to re-do/re-submit a revised proposal.
Project Presentation
You are required to do a project presentation in class
on 12/3/21 or 12/10/21.
Each presentation should last about 15 minutes,
with appropriate numbers of slides.
The presentation slides need to be submitted the day before
your presentation.
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.
-
Important figures/tables should be in the report itself,
not in the appendix,
accompanied by relevant descriptions/discussions in the main text of the report.
On the other hand,
you shouldn't include large numbers of 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 evaluation (and other activities) 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@smu.edu).
Posted: Oct. 14, 2021.
Last update: Oct. 14, 2021.