Group Projects

Group Projects CS5734 Group Projects

Everyone will participate in a small group (3-4 people) project; groups must be formed by the end of the second week of class (i.e., by January 23). The project may be either a behavioral or a design project. Each project will have 3 deliverables: a project plan, a final report, and a project presentation.

Behavioral projects can be either experimental or ethnographic, and should have as a goal the development of implications for design--either re-design, if the evaluation is of an existing system, or first-time design, if the evaluation is of a workplace and its requirements.

Design projects should be based on existing work, either requirements documented by prior research, or enhancements to existing systems. They should result in a prototype system (the platform is your choice). If the system concept is a large one, you should scope the prototype, such that it can demonstrate at least 5 central user scenarios.

I recommend (but do not require) that students schedule an appointment with me before making a commitment to their project, to get feedback on scope and feasbility.

Project Plan (due in class, March 25)
This should be a brief, relatively informal report (2-3 pages) documenting the goals and rationale for the project: what you plan to do and how. It should include an indication of your end-point (e.g., if a design project, what will actually be prototyped; if an evaluation project, what/how tasks will be evaluated, what analyses carried out). It should also include your current status and a best-guess schedule for the remaining work.

Project Report (due in class, April 27)
This should be a complete report of your project: its goals, methods (with associated rationale), and results (either the behavioral analyses or a system description). It should conclude with a discussion of implications, future directions, open issues, etc. Be sure to cite other relevant work as appropriate.

Like the short paper, the project report should be formatted in ACM-conference style; you'll find a template on the CHI'98 pages. There is no page requirement, but it should have the approximate "flavor" and length of a CHI paper. (In fact, I encourage interested students to consider developing the paper as an actual submission.) You may find it helpful to use the various conference papers you will be reading as examples.

Project Presentations (to be scheduled for the week of April 27)
Each group will provide a short presentation of their project's goals, methods and outcomes. Because we will be trying to fit in 3-4 projects per session, the presentations will need to be brief, 15-20 minutes. For teams building prototypes, we will try to arrange for demo-ing facilities, but you should not count on this.